Unfortunately, when it comes to your website, the "if you build it, they will come" strategy just doesn't work. Fortunately, there are many ways to drive high-quality traffic to your website for little to no cost. The following 5 strategies will show you how:
1. Optimize your site for the search engines.
You'd have to be a fulltime search engine optimization expert to keep up with all the changes the major search engines make, but there are a few basic things you can do to help your site come up for relevant searches. Here are some to get you started:a. Define your keywords - this is how people will find your business online. The trick is to find keywords that are highly relevant to what you offer and popular enough that they will attract decent traffic to your site, but not so competitive that you can't rank well using them. Use your keywords in your web page copy.b. Create your metatags - this is how the search engines "read" your site. Put your keywords in your metatags on each page of your website.c. Don't use lots of graphics or Flash, frames, or "alt" tags in HTML for pictures - search engines don't like them because it makes it hard for them to "read" your site.d. Submit your site to the search engines - (see #2).e. Get links to your site - create a page in your website and call it either resources or links and add GOOD links, meaning relevant links. Linking is the second biggest indicator of how your site is ranked.
2. Submit your site to the search engines.
Why wait for the search engines' robots or spiders to find you? Submit your website (it's best if you submit every page individually) to at least these four major search engines and directories manually. It's easy and only takes a minute.
Submit your web pages to:
Alexa: http://pages.alexa.com/hrlp/webmasters/index.html
Yahoo at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
DMoz at http://www.dmoz.com/add.html
3. Swap ads with other ezines in your niche.
Seek out other ezines in your niche whose publishers might be interested in swapping ads. They can either be formals ads, or just a recommendation within the content of the ezine itself. I've used this strategy myself, with the result being lots of new visitors to my website and new subscribers to my ezine.
4. Be a bonus participant.
You're probably aware of the tactic of adding valuable bonuses to your offerings to encourage people to buy. As a traffic-building technique, you could do the same for someone else's product offering. For example, when Andrea Lee released her second edition of "Multiple Streams of Coaching Income" print book, one of my audio products was offered as a bonus to those who bought the book. I received loads of new visitors to my website and had a nice spike in ezine subscribers as well as a result.
5. Become an "ask the expert" on a high-traffic website in your niche.
Seek out websites that are information portals for your niche, and see if they offer an "ask the expert" section (and if they don't, you could always suggest they do). Offer your services as an expert, to answer questions from their visitors about the challenges they face.
For example, I'm the online marketing expert at www.womans-net.com, and an expert within the Circle of Experts at www.adrpracticebuilder.com and I get targeted traffic from people visiting these sites.
These 5 ways of attracting targeted traffic to your website are tried-and true, meaning they DO work. They are all things you can do right now to start driving more more high-quality traffic to your online business today.
© 2007 Alicia M Forest and ClientAbundance.com
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