How to Increase Your Website Traffic

Learning how to increase web site traffic will make a massive difference to how much money you can make from your site. Your website’s income is more or less a function of your traffic and your conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers). This article is going to cover the best methods of increasing traffic to your web site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is far and away the best way to build large quantities of consistent, long term traffic to your web site. The only drawback with SEO is that it can take a long time to bear fruit. You may have to work for months - or pay someone else to - before you start seeing the results you really want.

The amount of time and effort it will take to generate significant traffic from the search engines will depend on the keywords you’re targeting. "Niche marketing" is a common term in online marketing - if you’re not already familiar with it, you ought to be. This concept is all about finding a very small, specialized market- a niche - and tailoring your website to appeal to that market segment.

If you have a very broad site about all sorts of different topics but your traffic is low, this is probably why. It’s easier to get search engine traffic to a website for a bunch of related, "niche" keywords than it is to rank well for big, broad keywords. For example, if you have a website on "sports" with a page on "golf" and one on "basketball," and so on, your chances of ever getting in the top 10 on Google for any of those terms is virtually nil.

On the other hand, if you target specific terms like "women’s golf shoes," "cheap golf clubs," and so on, you will find it much easier to rank well for those terms. Remember, if you can’t get into the top 10 you’re going to miss 90% of the traffic.

So start focusing on "niche" terms that are easier to win and rank well for.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC advertising can be a good way to generate traffic - if you do it right. It generally works best for products with high profit margins, because the vast majority of people who click through won’t buy anything from you.

The problem with PPC is that it can be very, very expensive. This is especially true if you are bidding on high-competition keywords in a tough niche. Some advertisers are paying over $100 per click on certain high value keywords. You also have to be prepared to experiment until you get the conversions you want, and that means risking losing money at the beginning. So for a PPC campaign to be successful, you need to have some cash to throw at it to get things up and running. Even then, the returns can’t match those of a good SEO campaign, in the long term. The only advantage of PPC over SEO is that you can see results happening a lot faster.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is another method of increasing website traffic – this is simply submitting articles to sites such as Buzzle, with a link back to your website. You should be aware that adding an article to another site is most often a lower-yield activity than adding a new web page on your own site. However, there are a few advantages to article marketing.

For one thing, article sites often have a lot of traffic themselves, so when your site is young a bit of article marketing can give you an early boost. Also, the top article marketing sites will provide strong links back to your site. Links are one of the main ingredients which, when combined with great content, lead to high search engine rankings – which again means more traffic.