Depending on your kind of business, this can be quite difficult. If you're selling things that other people are selling it can be very hard to get your pages ranked. This is especially true if you're just using standard descriptions rather than creating your own, or if you have a company generated webpage that gives you no control over these things.
One of the simplest ways to handle this is to start a blog. If you have your own domain, I strongly recommend getting the free Wordpress software (one click install on most hosts) and using that.
But if you don't have a way to put a blog on your site, there are many free options. Blogger is quite popular, partially because it is from Google, and people feel it may get spidered more often, but also because they don't mind you advertising on it. Some other free blogs do not want you using their sites for commercial purposes of any kind.
The danger to any free blog is that it can be deleted at any time, with little or no notice. But so long as you follow the rules this will only rarely be a problem. Hosting your own is far safer.
On your blog, you want to write posts and articles that will bring people to your blog and get them interested in your products. It is not so easy as writing blatant ads, which most people won't read. You want to write articles that will make people want to use what you have to offer.
Free tips relevant to the products are generally a very good idea. They can be fun to write, and if you get creative and think of unusual uses, you can get people who might not have purchased your products to try them.
Most blog posts are fairly short. You don't have to write a novel. Sometimes even just a few sentences will do... just so long as those sentences have something interesting to say.
One of the most important things about blogging to promote your business is to make sure that you post regularly. Weekly is a bare minimum, but most successful bloggers post more often than that. Some even post many times throughout the day, every day. You just have to figure out what works best for your business.
Posting on your blog is not enough. You need to ping as well. If you're using the Wordpress software, it can be set up to ping automatically. You at the very least want to ping one of the services that will ping other sites for you.
Ok, ok, I'll tell you what pinging is. Otherwise that last paragraph will be just nonsense to some people. A ping is a signal sent to sites that accept them, that lets them know that you have new content for them to look at.
You can do this manually by visiting sites as well. One of the most popular sites to ping is Technorati. If you sign up for an account and claim your blog, you can go in and manually ping it if you can't figure out how to do it on your blogging software. On Wordpress software, you just have to go to Options - Writing to tell it where to ping.
Once your blog is up and running, it can be a huge help to your other site in building both traffic and sales. And you might just enjoy the blogging part of it too.
Every time you publish a post to your site, your ping list gets notified that you have added new content. Spiders come and visit your site and index the new post. That's one of the great things about blogs.
It's important to add content to your blog regularly. Posting every day is a great goal. You will get more traffic if you post every day than if you post once a week or even every few days.
Once you have published your post and the ping list is notified, what else can you do? If your post is well-written and contains information that others would find interesting or useful, you can submit your post to various social bookmarking sites.
There are social bookmarking sites for different topics. Digg focuses on news. MarkTD and PlugIM focus on internet marketing topics. There are many social bookmarking sites to choose from.
Try submitting your posts to various social bookmarking sites. Don't submit every post to the same sites. You can also place bookmarklets on the bottom of your post so readers can vote for your article at the social bookmarking sites. Perhaps you have noticed sites that have these.
Get Traffic with Article Syndication
Writing articles and syndicating them to article directories is a powerful technique. Write the article (or have it written for you), post it to your site, and wait a few days for the search engines to find it.
Once it has been indexed, submit the article to some article directories, such as EzineArticles.com and ArticleAlley.com. There are also sites on the Internet that you pay a nominal fee to submit your article to hundreds of article directories or ezines.
For better results submit your article with various changes made so each one is unique. It only takes a few minutes to make some simple changes. Then submit a unique article to each article directory. Search engines love original content.
Tracking and Statistics
If your hosting service uses Cpanel then a traffic and statistics package comes with your blog. Log into your Cpanel, click on the Web Stats icon, and you are taken to a page with several statistics options.
Awstats and Webalizer are two very popular programs that tell you how much traffic is coming to your site each day. Awstats tells you where they came from, what pages they looked at, what they clicked to exit your site, how long visitors are staying on your site, keywords that people used to find your site, and much more.
Webalizer tells you the average visits per day on the main screen. If you click the link for any of the months another screen opens up with lots of information in graphs and charts.
It's not necessary to spend hours looking at this information, but spending a few minutes each week with these tools can help you know what you need to focus on to get more traffic and if you need to make changes so people stay longer.
For instance, if a large percentage of visitors are viewing your post on setting up a salt water aquarium, perhaps you could write a few more posts about that popular topic. Maybe it is an indication that there is a need for an e-book or video tutorial on setting up salt water aquariums.
Conclusion
Following the tactics listed in this article will help your traffic grow. Pinging, social bookmarking, writing articles and submitting them to article directories, social networking, and checking your traffic statistics are all basically free. They only require your time.
Both Stephanie Foster & Carol Stack 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.
Stephanie Foster has sinced written about articles on various topics from Credit Cards, Shopping and Pets. Stephanie Foster runs as a resource to help people get started. Stephanie Foster's top article generates over 823000 views. to your Favourites.
Carol Stack has sinced written about articles on various topics from Fitness, Fishing and Fitness. Grab lots of free information at on starting your own. Carol Stack's top article generates over 74000 views. to your Favourites.