How to Get Traffic to Your Website

[toc]So a lot of people mention briefly ways to get traffic and visitors to your websites, but a lot of times they forget about people who has absolutely no clue on what they are talking about, the internet hasn’t been here long enough for these subjects to be like warm water. For this reason I bring you a clear “for dummies” post on building traffic to your site.

While the dot-com boom of the late 1990s is long in the past, there are still countless ways to make a good living with a website. People can open up and operate their own website on any topic they want, or they can hire a webmaster to run the site for them, the internet is just getting started. Either way, aside from promoting products and using your website as a way of setting up an online store, there are other ways to make money when you figure out how to get traffic to your website. You need to learn how to get traffic to your website on a regular basis to have the best chance to make money. And the best part of it? It’s very exiting.

In recent years, the need to determine how to get traffic to your website has been found to be as important to making money as the content on the page. You can have the best product on the market, but if you didn’t spend the time or money to determine how to get traffic, your product will never be seen. There are several different methods that website operators can use today that will help drive traffic to their websites. These methods involve using various social media tools, different new age advertising options, researched web articles promoting keywords and traditional classified advertising methods.

What are the top keywords to keep in mind when trying to figure out how to get traffic to your website?

Hot to get Traffic With SEO

For a lot of websites, how to get traffic depends on ranking high on the search engines for  important or relevant keywords to their topic. Also known as search engine optimization, SEO is the process that affects the visibility of a website or page in search engines organic searches. An organic search is another name for an “unpaid” search that features only results that are at the top of search engine pages because of the keywords found within the page. The higher ranked a website appears on a search indicates the high frequency that a website appears in search results and essentially answers how to get traffic. SEO is considered by many to be the best way to determine how to get traffic to your website.

SEO is a proven internet marketing strategy that examines how Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines operate. These search engines use different formulas and identifying markers to showcase where webpages show up on search results and their methods affect how to get traffic. SEO looks at what different types of searches users are making on a daily basis and help writers reach to those areas in an effort to find out how to get traffic. This can be with written articles, images, local searches, video searches, academic searches, industry-specific searches, and news searches. No matter what type of search people are making online, how to get traffic can be adjusted because of them.

Another thing SEO does is look at exactly what keywords are being entered into search engines and what search engines are being used more frequently. By optimizing your website to meet these needs, you are improving the likelihood that your page will improve in the rankings and how to get traffic to your page on a regular basis. You can optimize your website in many ways including by editing the content, HTML and associated coding which helps to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to indexing activities of search engines. How to get traffic to a website isn’t as simple as just posting relevant information anymore.

This is a tool that has been used since before the dot-com boom began in the 1990s. Originally all you needed to do was submit the address of your page to the various search engines and it would show and that would be how to get traffic. The search engines would then send something called a “spider” to go into the website and extract all relevant keywords and indexes the information.

SEO softwares are a great help to automate ours optimization tasks, the trick is choosing the right software. I wrote and article doing 7 seo software reviews  of those that help me every day with my own tasks. It should be very helpful.

In these days, search engines were often manipulated into giving high results to websites that “stuffed” their pages with keywords. How to get traffic was much easier at this stage in the internet boom. As a way to combat this, search engines had to change the way their system looked at websites and how to get traffic. Search engines understand that if they continue to push out bad results on any given topic that the users would search for another search engine in the future. What these search engines did was change their algorithm, making it more difficult for webmasters to manipulate and make it more difficult for them to determine how to get traffic.

The ever changing algorithms from different search engines have made it a more difficult process for SEO experts to find the best way onto search results pages and consistently find out how to get traffic. In 2011, Google announced a new “Panda” program that was targeted at “content farms,” dropping these website listings off the results pages.

The latest SEO technique used is determining what keywords are the most important in the article. Say you are writing an article for a pizza delivery company. Your keyword could be “whole wheat crust.” In this situation, how to get traffic to your website would be by using the keyword four times in the article without it sounding too generic. You would use it once in the opening paragraph, followed by two times in the body, and once more in the conclusion. This isn’t an exact science for how to get traffic to your website, but it is a method that has been known to work well, especially as of late.

“…The objective is not to “make your links appear natural”; the objective is that your links are natural.” – Matt Cutts

mattcutts.com

Personally, I think that’s great, but B.S. Why? Well, first of all if that’s Google’s philosophy then they should put less emphasis  on a website’s backlinks and let the new born websites probe they can post and be better ad more innovative than established authority sites. If nobody did ANY kind of effort  to get backlinks to their websites then the R.O.I. on internet based businesses that rely on organic traffic would be dead slow, almost impossible for no budget start ups to make it online (who rely on organic traffic). Then again, I do think Matt is right on the side that people should focus 110% on providing quality content on their sites and avoiding dark black hat techniques to build backlinks.

The efforts I think you should do to improve you off-site SEO (backlinks) is getting in touch with other businesses on your niche, establish relationships, create a network of mutually recommended content, and be very social with your audience.

If you enjoy SEO. I have 13 search engine optimization tips that will make your life easier.

How to get Traffic With Social Media

Social media is the latest craze in determining how to get traffic to your website on a regular basis. With any given article, it will be posted live on your website. You will promote it instantly on Facebook by liking it. You’ll then take the link and post it on Twitter. After that, if it is an article you wrote or something on your own website, you will post a LinkedIn status update with the link. If it was a personal interview you did with a celebrity, you would then share a picture you took with the star on Instagram and link it back to your article. The next step you would take would be creating a post on your Pinterest account. All of these methods will help you determine the best course for how to get traffic.

 “Activate your fans, don’t just collect them like baseball cards.” – Jay Baer, Convince & Convert

Again, like I said earlier, feedback is your friend. You need to let your website go viral, focus on content, ask your audience what they need, then serve it to them on a silver platter.  Think of social media as going to a party. You don’t go to parties and meet new people then immediately say “Hey wanna buy this protein shake?”. It’s ALL about building trust and relationships.

With each of these “likes” and “shares,” you are adding to your online blueprint. Your online blueprint is an ideal way for you to determine how to get traffic to your website. Each social media website has its own pros and cons and in the case of most, they work for the better by determining how to get traffic if they are being used the right way.
Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the world. It can be reached on your home computer or laptop and is accessible on most cell phones with the Facebook app. As of January 2013, the social media website boasts that there are more than 1.06 billion active monthly users. The social media tool is used each day for personal status updates, checking in to restaurants and sporting events, adding pictures, and sending out invitations to your spring barbeque to your friends and family.

Websites can also use this social media tool to try and figure out how to get traffic to their pages. By linking new articles, pictures, or even events to their Facebook, they are not only reaching their circle of friends and followers, they are also reaching out to anyone on Facebook that is friends with someone who liked or commented on the post. This tool makes the question of how to get traffic to a website easier to answer. If you can find the right blend of content worth going viral with the proper promotion of the content, how to get traffic will always be an easy thing for you to handle.

Another website, Twitter, just recently celebrated its seventh birthday as a social media tool. Since its inception, it has become a great way for websites to determine how to get traffic to their pages. Each day, more than 500 million tweets are sent along the social media networking website. During sporting events like the Super Bowl or events in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the number of tweets per day increases drastically. There are more than 500 million users on the website that use this tool each day. Some use it for personal gain and others use it when they are asked how to get traffic to their website.

While the social media website has more than 500 million users, the number of active users is less than that number at around 200 million. The website is one that has grown immensely over the years as it took just three years, two months, and one day to reach the billionth tweet. With its increased popularity, how to get traffic by using the website and app are easy.
The website has been turned into a news-passing website that allows users to spread their own news or retweet other news. When Michael Jackson died, the social media tool erupted with 456 tweets per second, which was the record at that time. If you had a Michael Jackson fanpage, how to get traffic at that time would have been posting updates on the developments as you got them and tweet them to your followers.

LinkedIn is a tool that is used more in the business world. The website was founded in 2002 and launched in 2003. The main use of the website at that time was as a professional networking tool. The website has garnered a lot of users in the past 10 years, totaling more than 200 million in 200 countries and territories. In the United States alone, this website gets more than 21 million viewers monthly and more than 47 million around the world monthly. While it isn’t considered the best option when trying to find how to get traffic to your site, it can still be utilized.

In 2012, this website made more than $970 million and turned into a new way for website owners to figure out the important question of how to get traffic. Through connections on the website, you can find other users that may be in your line of work or industry which will ultimately help you to determine how to get traffic to your website. The more unique looks and impressions your website gets through these different people will help it grow drastically and make it a financial success.

Another application for mobile phones that used to solve the problem of how to get traffic to websites is with Instagram. This app has just recently opened up a website, but without the same abilities as the mobile app. One way the use of this app can help you determine how to get traffic to your website is if you met a celebrity for an interview. By posting a picture you had taken with you and the star, you can link it back to your article. By linking it back to your article and even tagging the celebrity in the picture, they may share the image and help you get that much more views.

This also applies to the Twitter of that certain celebrity. If they retweet the link for you, then you will not only get more followers, but more views to your website or article. How to get traffic to your website can be so much easier when you can get a connection like this with a celebrity or someone with a lot of followers. You can automatically set your Instagram posts to appear on your Twitter and Facebook feed, adding that much more possibility for impressions and the chance to answer the question of how to get traffic to your website.

Instagram is an app that isn’t used as much as Facebook or Twitter, but it is a growing app that has a chance to be one of the most used on mobile devices for years to come. The app launched in October 2010 and as of April 2012, already had more than 100 million users. The one downfall for this app to help website owners answer how to get traffic to their website is that Blackberry and Windows phone users don’t have access to the app. It is only available for Apple and Android products which could be an issue for some as they look for how to get traffic regularly.

Pinterest is another site that can help answer the question of how to get more traffic to your website. Pinterest is like virtual corkboard in which you can pin different webpages from different topics for easy access. These can be recipes, cool ideas, games, and more. You can follow friends and people that share the same interests as you and use your board to share important news about your website. The more your website offers items and content that are user-friendly, the likelier you will be able to find out how it can help you get traffic for your site.

Pinterest was launched in March 2010 and by August 2011, was called one of the “50 best websites of 2011” in an article in Time Magazine. One thing Pinterest has done for those who used the service before they opened their business or website was to allow you the chance to convert your account from a personal one to one meant solely for business purposes. If used the proper way, this could be an ideal way to help you determine the best way to get traffic to your webpages.

How to get Traffic With PPC

Also known as pay-per-click, PPC is another method to help you determine how to get traffic to your website. There are different advertising methods that you can use that are supposed to help you answer the question of how to get traffic. Getting more traffic to your website is the ultimate goal, whether you are getting paid for page views or paid with PPC or other advertising networks.

There are different ways of using PPC to enhance your website. You can use websites that pay Twitter users to post tweets on your behalf and the payment to these users would be based off the number of clicks they got.

This is also a method of how to get traffic to your website that can be cost efficient. If you own a website about sports, you may offer an advertising spot on your website to a publishing company for free. The only stipulation you could have would be getting PPC and/or with a percentage of the profit made from whatever sales may be made.

Depending on your market for how to get traffic will alter which method you use this service for. If you are a local company in Connecticut, you won’t be showing off your landscaping company to searches made in Colorado. This is one of the best ways for you to settle on how to get traffic for your website.

Advertisers select what market they want to have their services for by bidding on certain keywords in their target market. Let’s go back to the landscaping company in Connecticut. After their research, they saw that for them, how to get traffic to their website was by bidding on the keywords “landscaper in Connecticut,” and “landscaping in Litchfield County.” By bidding on these keywords, they are ensuring that an advertisement for their service will be seen as a “sponsored listing,” on these pages. For every person that clicks these links from those search engine pages, the advertiser would then pay that website a predetermined amount.

Another way that this form of advertisement would work outside of a search engine would be with a larger advertisement on a website. Some websites allow advertisements to be placed on their website based on the preferences of the person looking at the site. There may be three people on the website at one time. One may get an advertisement for tires, another may get an advertisement for a coffee maker, and the other could get an advertisement for ammunition. It all depends on what that person has been viewing on the internet and how that advertisement decides on how to get traffic. This goes with not using PPC to have your landscaping company promoted outside your territory. If the internet history of the user doesn’t show any interest in household appliances, it would be a waste of the website to have these advertisements on their page for certain users.

PPC is another ideal way for website owners to find out how to get traffic. There are affiliate programs for websites looking to host these advertisements that will reward them for click through with a percentage of the profit, in addition to the PPC.

When you see these advertisements on a website promoting other items, the question of how to get traffic and what the efficiency at completing this task are asked. It isn’t something that you can ask others about to determine how well it will work for you. Different businesses have different advertising strategies that work best for some and not so well for others.

When answer how to get traffic to their websites, some companies think that PPC is a great way to make money by using click fraud. There are some websites and advertisement companies that have gone the extra length of guarding against these abusive clicks from companies.

Getting Visitors With Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is similar to that seen in PPC. This can be found on any part of a website. It can be the large banner on the top of the website or the smaller advertisements below each post. With each website come different styles and protocols for them. How to get traffic to your website might revolve around getting larger banner advertising markets. Some websites allow banners that take up the entire page. This is a common occurrence when you attempt to visit a website and are directed to an advertisement first. It could be video ad, or an image advertising a product. With a lot of these websites, you can either skip the advertisement after a certain time period has elapsed or you need to wait until the video is done playing to see your desired page.

Some companies feel that this is the best way for them to figure out how to get traffic. When these forms of banner advertising appear and the banner is clicked, the user will be directed to the intended website and the advertising company will show that this occurred. For companies that get paid commission on top of PPC services, the most accurate information they receive will result in the most amount of money they are entitled to.

How to get traffic is as important of a question as anything else with owning a business or website. It can be how to get foot traffic or virtually with how to get traffic to your website. Banners are one of the most common and popular forms of completing this task.

The banners you seen when you go to a webpage isn’t determined by the webmaster, rather it is determined by the settings within the website and the company that is hosting the website. For example, if you choose to open up a Blogspot blog, you can choose to place banners from Google. In this case, how you get traffic and who sees certain advertisements depends on what that company has set up as an algorithm for their services.

How to get traffic to a website is something that can be the difference between a website making legitimate money and a website making enough to pay their website hosting fees each month. If you don’t have an item to sell on your website, you likely won’t be paying much, or anything, to run your website or blog. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to make money off the page and in that case, you need to decipher what is the best way and how to get traffic the right way.

Another form of banner advertising that is seen often on the internet today is something that many find to be annoying are pop up advertisements. This banner advertising method automatically opens up a new page or “pop up” page with their ad. You can easily “X” out of the page and go back to the website you were looking for, but this is something that many people feel is an invasion of their right to use the internet properly. If you are trying to figure out how to get traffic to your website and have the choice between a pop up advertisement or a banner advertising your page that is embedded on a website, you may want to shy away from the pop up.

Getting Traffic with Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate marketing program is one way many have felt answer how to get traffic the best. It is a performance-based marketing procedure that rewards affiliates or website hosts for displaying their banner advertising images. How to get traffic to your website has different ways of working with this method.

With each affiliate marketing program, there are essentially four different players involved. There is the merchant putting banner advertising methods out there for the world to see, the network that keeps tracks of the money made through these affiliate marketing links, the publisher that runs the website and allowed this affiliate marketing program to take place, and the consumer that saw the form of banner advertising and made a purchase after the click through. In this affiliate marketing program, the first three tiers of the process will walk away with some money, while the final tier will be the one that essentially pays each party.

How to get traffic from the right sources is one reason why the use of affiliate marketing is on the rise. The use of affiliate marketing is one that many websites determined was the best way for them to get more traffic and money from their potential clients. It is a method that can be used on its own, or combined with SEO, email marketing, social media, PPC, and banner advertising to answer the question of how to get traffic. Some people consider that affiliate marketing is best combined with a series of the above methods of advertising.

There are some website operators that will attempt to cater to this clientele when trying to figure out how to get traffic. The more ways you can get your name and product out to the public, the likelier that you will be able to find how to get traffic to your page to begin with. In some cases, as soon as you got them there, you won’t need to worry about how to get traffic again, as they will bookmark your page if they like your product or service.

Last But Not Least: Classified Advertising

This is an older technique on how to get traffic to your website. Classified advertising is commonly found in newspapers and other periodicals. Classified advertising can also be found online at various websites. There is no distinction with classified advertising between products being issued for free or for a fee. Classified advertising may be the most common way for you to determine how to get traffic. You may be hosting a study for school looking for coffee drinkers or smokers and the best way to get this traffic and the people you need is with classified advertising. How to get traffic to your website can also be boosted with classified advertisements. Most newspapers have an online classified advertisement section to go with the printed section of the newspaper.

How to get traffic to your website is something that has changed immensely over the years. When the dot-com era was still at its best point, all some companies had to do to find out how to get traffic was to throw a lot of money at the problem. That is part of what helped to kill this booming era for internet entrepreneurs. How to get traffic is less about spending the most amount of money and more on making sure you are using the best techniques to reach the audience you are searching for.

Super Bowl advertisements aren’t used as a way to determine how to get traffic to your website. This advertising method is more about promoting a product that has already been established in the market. You may see some lesser-known companies promoting their products with this multi-million dollar advertising space, but for a company with less than 10 employees, it might not make the most sense.

How to get traffic to your website can be a lot more affordable for smaller companies that use a little more money to research the best techniques to answer how to get traffic to their website. There are countless methods available at the disposal of webmasters today that will help figure out how to get traffic to the websites that everyone is searching for.

 Take a breath now: let’s recap

Among the different techniques used by these websites are SEO tactics that are meant to try and trick search engines into placing these webpages higher on their search rankings. Another method is by using social media. Social media is one of the best answers to the question of how to get traffic to websites. With different websites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest, and others, how to get traffic to lesser-known websites has become an easier task than ever before.

Other methods that work to answer how to get traffic include PPC and banner advertising and implementing guerilla marketing ideas to your business. These two methods work together and offer their own pros and cons. With PPC, the website paying for the advertisement will only pay for a click through to their website from this advertisement. With a high-quality and attention grabbing banner advertising, you can get those clicks. Banner advertising and affiliate marketing are also linked together and offer websites that host their advertisements a portion of the profits made from their clicks.

Also, have you noticed how simple but ground breaking videos like the Harlem Shake have the ability to go insanely viral, for no apparent reason? I recently wrote a post about the best campaigns that could be replicated: The best 7 viral marketing campaign examples

One of the oldest methods for websites to determine how to get traffic to their website is by using classified advertising. Classified advertising appears in print in their own section or online in the newspaper or magazines electronic edition. Classified advertising may not completely jump to mind when thinking about how to get traffic to your website, but it is a technique that has worked since newspapers were first made.

No matter which you determine to be the best for you and your business, additional work needs to be done. When it comes to how to get traffic to your website, the best way may be to use a combination of everything from banner advertising to SEO to classified advertising.

So it was a long post, but i tried to cover all the basics of traffic.

Go ahead and share your thoughts on the comments below!