How To Drive Traffic To Your Website

November 19, 2008 |

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.

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get free traffic, but like any other website, you still have to get traffic to the main blog. However, blogs have a major advantage over regular websites because they have an RSS feed built in. Also, depending on which blogging platform you use, there are some instant advantages because if you use wordpress.com, the domain tends to rank very well with the search engines. Also, Google owns Blogger.com and has a tendency to “hang out” on their own properties looking for new updated content.

There are several social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us and other sites like this. You can “bookmark” your own blog posts and other pages to help them get ranked in the search engines. Often times these social bookmarking “tag” pages will get ranked as well. Although this isn’t a direct link, these pages can serve as bridge pages with links back to your site and these pages rank also rank very well with the search engines.

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.

Articles are an excellent way to get high quality links back to your website which will generate visitors as well as search engine benefits. The search engines reward relevant links and articles represent the most relevant pages simply because you are in charge of the content of every article. So, if you’re trying to get your site ranked for a specific keyword phrase, you can create articles on these topics and use the resource box or author profile to link back to your website using keywords for which you’re trying to get ranked.

Posting on forums is another great way to generate links back to you site. Find forums within your niche and start contributing to the conversations. Make sure that you’re posting on forums that allow you to add a signature with a link. Also, whenever possible, view the source on forums and see if they add a “nofollow” attrib within the link code. If they do, that forum won’t do much for your search engine optimization, but will work for getting clicks back to your website.

You can find that there are a lot of blogs that already get a lot of traffic. When you comment on these blogs, you’ll usually have an option to put in your name, email, url and your comment. If your comment is insightful and contributes to the value of the original post, you’ll have other readers of that same blog post find your comment and many times will click through to your blog. I’ve personally done this and also had visitors to my sites also from blogs for comments I’ve left.

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.

About the Author:

Brian is an internet business coach that specializes in internet credit card processing. Brian’s specialty is mostly with internet merchant accounts, but he has also done a good percentage of retail merchant accounts as well.