Increase Web Site Traffic With These Proven Methods

To increase web site traffic to your website, there are several methods that have proven to be very effective. Some of them are no cost, some of them are low cost and some can be very expensive. All webmasters should know that you don't stand a chance of your website being seen unless you are using several of these techniques. Targeted traffic is the life of any website or e-commerce business. You can increase web site traffic by using a variety of tactics, tools, and resources listed here.

No Cost Techniques

1. Optimizing your Web pages by using on-page and off-page optimization techniques. Using your selected keyword phrase or phrases in your meta tags and as the title of your page using h1 tags. If at all possible use a PHP or other script to rotate through several different tags. Place your keyword phrase throughout the body of your text. It also helps to have your keyword phrase appear near the end of the page. These techniques will help to increase your web traffic by improving search engine results.

Web sites with top 10 rankings can get thousands of visitors per month. Using simple math, if your web site ranked #1 for 20 keyword phrases that each received 20 visitors per day. That is a possible 12,000 visitors per month.

2. Allow visitors to Bookmark your site. Many webmasters fail to use this simple option. Make it available on every page and always include a favicon with color to make your site stand out in your visitor's list of sites.

3. Add a blog - Giving your visitors a place to interact. Postings should be placed in specific categories and monitored since you don't want someone posting inappropriate or illegal content. What a great way to get new, fresh, free, unique content for your website.

4. Increase web site traffic by writing articles based on the keywords that you want your website to rank for. Well written keyword articles don't have to be perfect. They just have to be well written with useful information for the reader. The idea here is that an article may be posted to many article sites and webmasters who want new content for their websites will put your article on their website containing your resource box. This in turn will give you a one-way link back to your website. The search engines love one-way links.

5. Providing RSS Feeds is an easy way to make your site's content available for others. RSS Feeds come in several forms and if possible you should provide more than one form of RSS feed. These too will be an excellent source of one-way links to your website.

6. Banner Exchanges can be very effective at getting targeted web traffic to your site. Look for ratios of 1:1 or 2:1. Your banner should look like text and compel the user to take action and click it right away. Banner exchange programs have an option to purchase banner impressions at very low prices. You may use this to put your business in front of many customers. But be aware that it usually takes many thousands of impressions to make a sale.

7. Send a press release about your company. Content for the release can be about achievements of the company or its personnel, but keep in mind that a press release is not a sales pitch. There are several free press release sites on the Internet.

8. Visit blogs and Forums related to your website and leave good information and comments related to the discussion. Make sure to have your website listed in your signature.

9. Have your signature (containing your website URL) in all of your outgoing email. How often do you email friends, family, co-workers? You never know who might be interested in what your website has to offer.

Techniques That May Cost

10. Link Exchanges are a great way to increase web site traffic, with several benefits. Traffic from the website you are getting a reciprocal link from and search engine traffic. There are places that charge to use their system to make contact with other webmasters to exchange links but, you can also search out those webmasters and make you own request. Make sure to periodically change your keyword phrases that you use in your link exchanges.

Some would say that this is a dying technique, but I currently have a website that receives over 100 visitors per day and I have done nothing other than link exchanges. Not even any on site SEO of any kind.

11. Pay-Per-Click campaigns are offered by all major search engines and can range from .01 per click to several dollars per click. This is a form of traffic that has the potential of being very expensive if you don't know what you are doing.

12. Offer something for FREE or very low cost. This may draw many visitors but, it may also have the possibility of drawing only the "freebee" seekers. These may not be the visitors that you want to target.

13. Web 2.0 offers several new ways to increase web site traffic by using videos, such as YouTube and Google Video. These are websites that allow you to store and share your videos. You may place a URL in your video as well as invite your "friends" to watch your video from your website.

14. Social Bookmarking is another relatively new way to get exposure to your website. Allow your visitors to bookmark your website, which in turn will increase the popularity of your website and increase your exposure within that bookmark site. Which leads to more visitors.

15. Classified and other ad sites. Do you have something to sell? Can you write a compelling ad and headline? You never know until you try. There are thousands of people searching these websites daily.

16. Many websites offer free web directories. You can submit your website to hundreds of free web directories. Make sure to put your website information in the correct category and watch how many one-way links your website will receive.

Users of Google, MSN, Yahoo or any other search engines, use keyword phrases to perform their searches. It is your job to learn which keyword phrases are most relevant to your site and use those in all of the above techniques.