Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. If your traffic is merely trickling round your website, your website will not be living up to its full potential. If you are the owner of an ailing website, you need to find ways to get that traffic pumping through every one of your website's arteries.

Let's look at a couple of ways you could give your website an immediate traffic transfusion and a course of therapy to ensure your website's long-term well-being.

Traffic Exchanges

Advertising your website on traffic exchanges is very simple as well as being quick to set up. Advertising on traffic exchanges as a free member will bring extra traffic to your website. Alternatively, you could pay for upgraded membership of the traffic exchanges and a set number of visitors will be sent to your website automatically.

Upgraded membership of traffic exchanges is not expensive and setting the campaign up is practically instant. However, the traffic is not targeted and that makes this form of advertising rather a hit and miss affair unless you are advertising the right kind of product in the right way. Remember, the people viewing your web pages will be other webmasters who are mainly focused on earning credits to get their own pages shown. In order to get their attention, you will need to learn the most effective ways to use traffic exchange advertising.

Pay Per Click Search Engines

The quickest way of obtaining targeted traffic for your website is by purchasing it via pay per click search engines. This is a little more tricky to set up than a basic traffic exchange campaign but PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic has the advantage that it will be more targeted. The way it works is that you place a brief advertisement at the search engine, provide a list of relevant search terms which you want to trigger your ad and state the maximum amount you are prepared to pay for each visit to your website.

There are hundreds of pay per click search engines and many of the smaller ones will accept bids as low as $0.01 per click on some keyword phrases where the bigger search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) will set a minimum bid rate of $0.05 or $0.10. This makes the smaller search engines seem an attractive prospect but, if you are new to PPC advertising, you would be better off sticking with the bigger search engines while you go through the inevitable trial and error stage of refining your campaign. The member support provided by the big search engines is generally excellent while the quality of help provided by small search engines can be non-existent.

Content

To improve search engine ranking, you need to add content to your website regularly. If you make it a habit to add a new page to your website twice or three times each week, in a year's time, your website will contain well over 100 pages for the search engines to index. The steady growth of your website will attract regular visits from the search engines because their robots thrive on fresh content. Do not duplicate your content, every page of your website must be unique. Duplicated content is worse than useless, it can be detrimental as it is considered to be spam and can lead to your site being banned by the search engines.

The best new content will be in the form of articles you write yourself. Some people feel that writing one - three original articles regularly each week is too much but the first article is the most difficult one. Once you complete your first article, each subsequent one gets easier to write and after the first few dozen, you will wonder why you ever thought it was going to be hard. If you are really unable to write your own articles, there are many places online where you can purchase ghost written articles for use on your website. If you decide to do this you need to make sure you are getting unique articles and not ones that are going to be circulated to hundreds of other people. The idea is to make your website stand out, not get lost in the crowd.

If you use all three of these website restoratives, you can quickly get your website into a good state of health in respect of number of visitors and position in the search engine rankings. Purchased traffic is like first aid for your website, the unique content is the long term remedy for good search engine placement.