Drive Traffic to Your Site If you ask a business advisor about the best place to set up a café, you’d most likely be advised to buy or lease a commercial property within a busy mall or at a busy intersection. Why? It’s the foot traffic; you want many people passing or walking by your establishment. The more people who pass by, the more people will come in to try your service. It’s not so different in the internet. If you have a virtual establishment online, then you’d better drive traffic to your site. You may make the best calligraphy work online, but if people cannot see your work to judge its merit you would be unlikely to get any customers; and people would not see your work if they cannot even find your website in the complex and gigantic labyrinth of the net. You simply cannot sell to people who are not around to appreciate what you have to offer. The following are some of the means for driving traffic to a website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) People commonly use a search engine to find whatever information, product or service that they need online. These search engines keep an extensive database of websites that their spiders (or crawlers) find in the net. These sites are indexed for words (people call these keywords) and when a particular keyword is entered by a search engine user, a list containing the sites that are relevant to this keyword will be generated. People are much more likely to visit the most relevant sites – the top ten results. To drive traffic to your website, therefore, you must make sure that your website is part of the search engines’ database and that it has been properly optimized so that it can be deemed relevant to the keywords that your potential customers are likely going to use to find a company like yours. Pay-per-Click Advertising SEO could be very tedious and it could take a very long time before its effects can be felt. To get more search engine traffic without waiting as long for results, you can try pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with search engines. With PPC, you can associate your ad with a keyword or keywords which you have bid for, and when these keywords have been searched, your PPC ad will appear at the right of the top search engine results. Your PPC ads will give your website instant exposure and this will drive traffic to your site. Viral Marketing Viral marketing is the equivalent of advertising by referral; that is, you should post content that would make people want to pass it on to others and inspire them to click on your link and thereby drive traffic to your site. One way of doing this is by posting ‘viral’ video content (videos that people can’t resist forwarding to their friends) at YouTube.
Since there are million of websites on the Internet today, and you have a lot of competitors, you need to use every technology available to get higher search engine rankings.
Surfers behavior has evolved other the years, and today, email marketing is not the sole holy gray of your Internet business.
He has no fear of being subject to spam, and therefore, the visitor is happy to add your site to his reader. He thinks that he is in control and he can choose to click and visit your website when he wants.
People are usually in hurry and don't want to waste their time, and prefer scanning instead of reading.
Furthermore, surfers want up to date information, and with the thousands of websites in any given subject, it is really hard for a busy man (or women) to find what he is searching for.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary). RSS will help you to increase traffic to your website because...
You will get better search engine position.
I use an blog with RSS feed enabled to get my sites in the top ten rankings in Google, MSN and Yahoo.
Tip: use wordpress for even better rankings (specially in Google). I don't really know why, but Google love wordpress more than other blogging platforms like type pad and bloggers itself!
You need to use a blog for this technique to be even more effective. It is common to get first position in the search engines for low competition keywords just because you switched to a blog, or you added RSS to your website.
Another reason to use RSS to increase website traffic is that surfers are fed up with "useless" e-zines.
Today, every person who spend more than one year surfing the Internet knows that most of the email newsletters are in fact... a big sales pitch.
For this reason, they don't give you their email easily.
Seth Godin said it best: now it's the area of ?permission marketing?, you need to gain the respect and admiration of your visitor.
When he appreciate your work, and see that you are a real expert on the subject, he will be the first in line to buy your products or affiliate product recommendation.
When you are involved in any online business, your content becomes really important. I'm sure you already heard the famous ?content is king?.
Without good content (and good products), you readers will only be one time readers, and it is the exact opposite as what you want for the success of your online business.
Now, it's up to you to add wonderful content, and choose great headlines that will appeal to your niche market.
RSS is a technology that you need to add to your arsenal. Whether you add RSS to your site, or you decide to blog, you will increase your traffic almost overnight.
Both Steve Pavis & Franck Silvestre are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Steve Pavis has sinced written about articles on various topics from Internet Marketing, Online Dating and Software. Did you know 90% of driving FREE traffic to your website is created by 3 major factors? Find out exactly what they are and how easily it is to solve them here