Wednesday, 9 September 2009

How To Drive Traffic To Your Website

By Brian Armstrong

The holy grail of internet marketing seems to be getting "free" traffic. Even though you could do a lot with paid traffic, such as pay-per-click, free traffic is great. There are several ways you can get some free traffic to your main website.

Now, blogging can be like any other website that alone isn't going to get any traffic. However, depending on which blogging platform you use, you'll have an instant leveraged website or web platform you can use to get traffic assuming you use the right keywords in the right places on those blog posts. For instance, Blogger.com and Wordpress.com tend to rank relatively well with the search engines, especially with Google.

You can use social bookmarking sites to get both links back to your site for the search engines as well as direct traffic from people visiting these social bookmarking sites and clicking on the links in your bookmarks. You can use sites like socialmarker.com to get a list of social bookmarking sites that can be used to bookmark your blog posts, pages on the site and also use the profile options with several of these social bookmarking sites that allow you to put links in for your websites into the profiles.

Some other sites that can help you get traffic and rank well on their own are sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. If you have done your keyword research and know what keywords are getting searched for, you'll have an easy time finding keywords that are getting searched, but have very little competition. Using these keywords in the title of your Squidoo "Lens" or your Hubpages "Hub". Using the keywords in both your title and again throughout the page you create then doing some additional social bookmarking links back to your "Lens" or "Hub" and watch it get ranked in the search engines.

Next to pay-per-click, articles are the best way to get your website ranked and get traffic back to your website. The main reason these article websites are so good is because the pages on which your article shows up are very relevant and the links that are allowed in the author profile or resource box. Many of the good article sites also have a lot of "authority" with the search engines and their article pages rank very well which also means that the link values passed along from these types of sites are very high.

Contributing to forums is a great way to get links back to your site as well. The downside to most forums is that they have a "nofollow" policy which means that the links aren't "followed" by the search engines. These forums may not do as much to help you from the search engine perspective alone, but an often visited forum in a niche you're in will get you some targeted traffic. This is usually done by adding a signature to your posts with a link. You'll have to check with the forum to make sure this is ok and determine what their policy is regarding their signatures.

There are a lot of blogs that you can add your comment to. These comments can be used for the search engine benefit by using your keyword phrase as the link back to your site. If the blog is a "popular" blog where many people add comments, the webmaster or blog owner may have a setting that prevent the search engine from giving credit for that link. In those cases, you can use the more popular blogs to link back to your site and simply get some clicks back to your site. This puts some of the pressure on to write comments that encourage the clicks.

Getting free traffic, or even paying for traffic is just the start to making sales and making money. These techniques can be used for non-ecommerce related sites as well.

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