Easy and Simple 10 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Site

There are plenty of tips on how to drive traffic to your website. What follows is a few tips from my experiences.

Before I start listing the 10 tips there is one general piece of advice, to do with research really. Before you begin doing any kind of promotion you’ll need to think about what kind of visitors you want to visit your site. Getting people to your site is one thing but if they’re not interested in your site at all then why waste bandwidth on them? Think about where these people are likely to be, and do a bit of searching on google to find these websites. Type in keywords these people might type into google and you’ll find sites they’re likely to be visiting frequently. Make a list of these sites as they’ll come in handy, try and find about 10.

1. Blog Comments
Now it’s time to put your list to use. In your list you should have a few blogs. Head over to these blogs and start reading posts. When you come across a post you have a response or an opinion on, write a comment about their post. The trick here is not to promote your site, the comment should be about their blog post giving your opinions. The reason for this is two fold, firstly if your comment is just promoting your site the blog owner will probably delete the comment thinking it is spam. Secondly, if other visitors to the blog see you commenting regularly and appear to be knowledgeable on the subject, they are more likely to visit your site. Of course, comment forms usually include a website box, which will make your name clickable. So you are still getting your website link in there, but you are giving it more importance and increasing the chance people will actually click it by commenting something meaningful.

Once you’ve done this on the blogs you found in your research, you can try and find similar sites on Google, using your keywords and “blog”. You should also visit all of the blogs regularly, if not daily, commenting regularly. The more links back the better!

2. Forums
Next up go back to your list of sites and you are likely to find some of them are (or have) forums. In a similar way to blogs, you shouldn’t join forums to advertise your site on. What you should do is join up and contribute to the discussions. Read threads and if you have an opinion or response, post up a reply. Even start some topics to get some discussions going. In your control panel you can set a signature, which is attached to all your posts. Pop in a link to your website and your website link will appear on all your posts! Again, the theory behind this is to let people know you know what you’re talking about. If people see you to be knowledgeable on the subject, they will trust you more, and are therefore more likely to visit your website.

Once you’ve done this on the forums you found in your research, you can try and find similar sites on Google, using your keywords and “forum”. You should also visit all of the forums regularly, if not daily, posting regularly. The more links back the better!

3. Articles
Writing articles about your subject can drive a significant amount of traffic to your site, and there are two ways you can do this. You will need to write some quality articles about your niche, articles about things your target audience will want to read.

The first way to use these articles is to have an articles section on your site (or indeed a blog). Put your articles up and use Social Bookmarking (see No.5) sites to drive traffic to them. They will also fill your pages with keywords that will help with your SEO (see No.4).

The second way is to submit articles to article directories, such as ezine articles. To do this the article must not be published elsewhere on the internet. These article directories allow users to publish these articles on their websites, keeping the entire article intact. So all links in your article will appear on many websites around the net! You can also include an “About Me” section with each article, which is where you say a little bit about your website and have a link to it - again this will appear on any website the article is published on.

One trick you can use when submitting to article directories is what is known as “spinning” articles. This is simply rewriting articles so that the content is slightly different. Because the two articles are not identical you can publish one on your website and one on an article directory. A good way to do this is read an article you’ve written, and then attempt to write it again without looking back. You’ll end up with a different article.

4. SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a whole beast of its own. I’ll just put a summary of things you should be doing here, and go into more detail in a future article.

You should be targeting certain keywords (you thought of these during your research). These keywords should appear in your page title (in the browser window), in your meta description, meta keywords, h1 tag, in one tag, in image alt tags and in your page content a few times. The trick is to include these keywords while still keeping your text humanly readable. Other good places are in your domain name and image file names.

On top of the above, keeping your code clean and fully XHTML/CSS will help a little, while also keeping your site nice and super fast.

Finally incoming links to your site are important too. Put simply, the more people linking to your website, the more important your site is seen to be, and therefore it deserves to be higher in the rankings. Taking Google as an example, each web page has a “Page Rank” between 1 and 10 which determines how important that page is. The more links back you have the higher your Page Rank will be. How important the pages linking to you are is important also. A link from a Page Rank 8 page will be much more beneficial than one from a Page Rank 1 page. A lot of the promotion methods here involve increasing the number of links you have pointing to your site. Things to avoid are just spamming places with your link, and pages that are just full of external links.

5. Social Bookmarking/Networking
Social Bookmarking sites are sites such as Technorati, Digg, Stumble Upon etc. There are lots of them out there, and the idea is based around sharing links with others. Typically the best links receive more kudos from the community, and therefore more traffic is sent your way. When joining these sites it is a good idea to participate in the community before submitting your own links, making a few friends and showing that you are real and not just there to submit your links.

Social Networking sites are sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc. These sites have a community feel about them, and are based around connecting with others. Again joining these sites and being a part of the community is the way to go. Contributing and connecting with people.

6. Directories
Directory submissions can provide you with decent traffic and back links. I would suggest going for the big directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo, along with niche specific directories for more targeted links.

7. PR
Traditional PR and online PR is good for raising your website’s profile and sending some traffic your way. A good press release is key for this, and I would probably recommend getting some advice or even hiring someone to write it for you. A good online PR distribution service is PR Web.

8. Offline Promotion
Even though your website is online, offline promotion shouldn’t be ignored. Business cards, flyers, ads in newspapers and magazines, posters and networking can all help in getting people to your site, especially if your site is localised or for a specific audience.

9. Product Feeds
If you are selling products, product feeds that you can submit to price comparison websites such as Google Products and Shopping.com can send some good leads your way. You probably won’t see masses of traffic, but those who do click through are very likely to buy your products.

10. PPC Advertising
Finally, PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising when used well can give some good results for little investment. Services such as Google Adwords provide you with tools that allow you to narrow down your target market with keywords, set daily budgets and control how much you’re spending. A good tip is to use very specific keywords, as they will be cheaper and more targeted. For example someone looking for black stripy socks will type “black stripy socks” into google. If you’re targeting “socks” as a keyword it is going to be more competitive and cost you more money, and if you don’t sell black stripy socks you’ve wasted that money. If however you do sell pink spotty socks, you can target those keywords, pay less for the clicks and have visitors who are looking for you product exactly.

Hopefully this post has given you a few ideas about how to promote your site!