gettraffic


How to attract visitors to your website

Now that you have gone to all the trouble of making your site, and getting it hosted, you are not finished.

The saying, “If you build it they will come!” is unfortunately not true. The sad truth is they won’t know about it unless you tell them, or someone else does.

If your site is so wonderful that everyone who sees it goes out and tells all their friends, your problems are solved. Just tell one person and within days you will have thousands of visitors.

Assuming your site is more normal, you need to get visitors some other way. There are 3 main ways:

  1. Links on other websites
  2. Search engines
  3. Advertising

Links on other websites
To get other webmasters to link to you, the best way is to ask them. If they are friends of yours, they will be happy to trade links with you. If the subject of your site is something their visitors may be interested in, almost anyone will consider linking to you. And if you link to them first, and email them telling them you have linked to them and you would be happy to get a link back, many will link back to you.

If your site has interesting or otherwise useful information, people will link to your site without being asked. That is the best kind of link.

Search engines
There are thousands of search engines, but 95% of the traffic comes from the top 6 or 7 search engines. You can tell those major ones, and let the others find out about you in their own time. They will eventually find it by following links from other sites. Here’s one place to tell the major search engines.

But before you release your site you should make it search engine friendly. It really isn’t hard to do. There are just a few things you need to remember to do:

  • Decide what your visitors will enter as search terms to find your site. Pick just a few words and phrases about your site. Those will be your keywords.
  • When you make your page title (on every page on your site) include as many of your keywords as you can, without making it look overdone.
  • When you make your “meta” description tag, include all your keywords, if posssible, in a meaningful sentence that’s not more than about 15 words long.
  • If you can put the same (meta description) sentence somewhere near the top of your page, it will be a plus.
  • The first text on your page should be keyword rich. Don’t waste that space by saying things like “welcome to my page”
  • You should use “alt” text for your images, and whenever it is reasonable they should include your keywords.

Also, of course, your site should really be about the subject you want the search engines to think it’s about. So have text on the pages discussing your subject.

Each page on your site should be separately optimized for search engines. If they are about different subjects, or different aspects of the same subject, the keywords and descriptions should indicate that.

Don’t try to trick the search engines. They are almost certainly smarter than you are about such tricks. If you are caught trying to trick them you may get banned from the search engine entirely.

All the search engines have different methods of deciding what pages they will show as the result of a search request. It is possible to spend a lot of effort optimizing pages for specific search engines, but usually that’s more trouble that it’s worth. Just when you have the perfect ratio of keywords to sentences, they will probably change the rules.

The more links there are to your site the sooner the search engines will find it, and the better they will like it. So get out there and exchange links with other sites.

There’s a product available, called Smart Page Pro that promises to help you make search engine friendly pages that will attract a lot of visitors that are interested in what you have to offer. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know if it’s any good.

Advertising
If you have a product to sell you may want to advertise. If it’s just a hobby site you probably will just wait for people to find you.

If you want to buy advertising, there are a lot of options.

You can buy an ad in a newspaper or magazine directing people to your website.

You can approach the webmaster of a website that you think your customers are likely to frequent and see if you can get them to show your ad.

You can look at eBay, they usually have banner advertising for sale at very reasonable rates.

Shareasale is a place you can go to sign up many other websites to advertise your product for a percentage or a fixed price for every sale. You can also use them to advertise other people’s products on your site.

Commission Junction is another company that connects people who want to sell their products with people who have space on their websites. They have a rather large monthly charge to be a seller, but it’s free to webmasters to find advertisers to sell for. If this looks at all interesting to you, take a look at their site and see what the details are. They are one of the major companies in that business.

Another option is to use search engines that you can pay per click. With Overture you set your own cost-per-lead and pay only for targeted customers, leading to a high ROI. Advertise with Overture..