Traffic - a website's most powerful asset

Driving targeted traffic to your website is not as easy as you might be tempted to think after poking around on the Internet and reading articles on the topic. You most probably have seen numerous websites advertising services in which, for fees ranging from a few bucks to hundreds of dollars, they would drive thousands of visitors to your website in, say, 24 hours. And although you will indeed see (by checking you website's stats) that your website has visitors you will not see any increases in clicks on your ads or in sells (that is, if you are selling anything). Why? Because these services will drive untargeted traffic to your website that will not benefit you in any way as by "untargeted" I mean people who are not interested in whatever your website is about, but people who are being tricked to your website through pop-ups and pop-unders and bogus links. And that is best case scenario as *some* of the visitors might actually click on your ads and might even purchase something from your website. But some of these services are actually using simple scripts that are sent to your website and simulating user behavior they "click" on some or your links tricking your web stats into thinking that a real person browsed through your pages. Using this technique, they will let the script "browse" your pages at regular intervals, for a few days, letting you think that you have traffic...

But how do we generate "targeted" traffic? In short, it is "organic traffic" that what you are looking for. "Organic" traffic refers to visitors coming to your website from search engines. That is, people actually searching for whatever your website is about, finding the link to your website in the search results and clicking on it. That is the best targeted traffic you can get. In this case, the probability of visitors clicking on ads or purchasing something from your website is very high.

Therefore, the question on how do we generate targeted traffic to our websites should sound more like "how do we rank well in search engines?" The answer is "one-way links" - links to your website from websites that you are not linking to. If a website is linking to your website and you are linking back to that particular website, that it is called "reciprocal linking" and does not count well for your website's ranking.

Building one-way links to your website is not that hard but it does take up some time. The easiest way to get started is to find a list of web directories that do not ask for reciprocal links. You can find hundreds of web directories but make sure you submit your website to those having a page rank of at least 2 or 3 as the higher the rank of the website linking to you, the better. The benefits of submitting your website to web directories will not be seen overnight as it might take some time (weeks or even months) until your website will be listed in these web directories. Of course, thing move much faster if you decide for paid web directories. Either ways, remember that submitting you website to web directories will most probably not get you any traffic but you do this to improve your rankings in search engines.

Another easy way to get one-way links to your website is to answer to questions on Yahoo! Answers. Search for questions on the same topic your website is about, give a relevant answer and don't forget to also give the link to your website so that users can read more on your website. This is even better than subscribing to web directories as this way you can benefit from both targeted traffic (depending on how good your answers are) and one-way links!

By far, the best way to build one way links is to write articles and submit them to article directories. Most article directories provide a so called "resource box" where authors write a few words about themselves. In most cases, this "resource box" is used to place a link back to the author's website. At first, this might not seem like such a good idea as it sounds quite impractical to spend the time and the effort to write a good article just for one link! Here's the trick: countless website owners rely on article directories for getting content for their websites - they simply take articles from these directories and republish them on their websites. Why is this good? This is good because they are required to also publish the "resource box" and therefore they create more one-way links to you. In time, you could have thousands of one way links just by writing a single article and having it published in a single article directory.

These are some tricks to get you started in promoting your website. Remember that ranking well in search engines is not something that will happen overnight. If you follow the steps described above you should start getting "organic" traffic to your website anywhere between one and four months. The actual time depends on a lot of factors as what your website is about, what are you selling, what is your target audience, how strong is the competition on the market you are targeting, who are your competitors, how much money are you willing to invest in advertising and even depending on your website's layout!