You all know how important search engine optimization is when you have to increase traffic to your website. SEO is usually supported by getting listed in search engine directories, article marketing and link building, but there are quite a number of practices that you need to look closer into before using them for traffic increase. I’ll mention just some of the ways that could help you increase traffic to your website, with the mention that the list is longer and more comprehensive.

Set up an affiliate program!

When you run an affiliate program you entrust other parties to sell for you. You can develop a particular web promotion model paying others if they get you clicks, leads or sales. The very names of such advertising patterns are relevant: pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or pay-per-customer for the nature of the transactions between a business and its affiliates.

Use email marketing!

Email campaigns can seriously increase traffic to your website if you know how to conduct them. Make sure your home web page contains an opt-in feature so that prospects can sign up for newsletters. Email marketing takes a lot of hard work and a possible investment into automatic email blasters, but it gives you a better chance to stay in touch with your customers.

Run promotions!

People are attracted by special offers! Everybody loves discounts, bonuses or free gifts. Use these into your advantage and run special promotions with the offer of the week, the offer of the month, rewards for returning customers and so on. We are all familiar with the ‘buy one and get one for free’ formula, why not adapt it to your particular business situation?

Make your website resourceful and helpful!

A new online trend follows good Internet ‘citizenship’. How good an Internet citizen are you? Be ready-to assist no matter what a client contacts you for (within the limits of your expertise and business), provide informative resources so that people may appreciate your effort to provide alternatives and, most important, make quality rule of the thumb!

Publish yourself!

A website that has fresh information all the time attracts visitors and search engines alike. You can increase traffic to your website if you give your readers some reason to return. Other materials can be further distributed across the world wide web through article submission services. These will help you build links due to the incorporated URLs.

Good luck!

Before you try any strategy to increase search engine traffic, I suggest you run a deep analysis of your website to see what works and what doesn’t. For new websites, a bit of reading could prevent avoid major pitfalls in online marketing. It is important to learn how to draw traffic from major search engines like Yahoo! and Google, because these get you access to the most targeted visitors. There are quite a number of tools available that allow the website owner to analyze the amount of traffic coming from search engines; you basically calculate the percentage of visitors.

The analysis as such consists in checking the log files of your website over a specific period of time; it all depends on the number of visitors and the topics that your site covers. It will take from several days to several weeks to come up with a reliable database of search queries, but you’ll have where to extract knowledge from. A common problem that web marketers are not always aware of is that some of the pages don’t get hits from the search engines. You will then have to determine why these pages do not attract visitors. Solving this problem will increase search engine traffic visibly!

In most cases this problem appears with auxiliary pages in the website when they pose little interest for visitors. Most web marketers do not worry that much over auxiliary pages, and they are probably right. But if key pages remain unvisited by web surfers, this is a serious warning! The common factors that leave a key page unnoticed by search engines include:

-page size, too large pages are difficult to index by search engine crawlers;
-links may be invalid or difficult to detect when they are located in a menu with complex Java Script code;
-the website has a very deep structure which leaves the deeper pages undetected.

Another problem that may prevent traffic from reaching your pages lies in invalid coding. In order to prevent problems and make sure that all of the content gets correctly indexed, you should try an HTML code validation service. When viewing the pages in the browser it could be difficult to detect the errors, but in the validation process, all the errors become visible. You should be able to increase search engine traffic without other challenges if the code is corrected.

If you submit your pages to professional investigations, you should get the answer to your problem sooner than by investigating yourself.

There is a common belief among Internet marketers that free article marketing works wonders for business growth, and to some extent this is correct. Article marketing could be a real gold mine if you know how to use it. The whole world wide web depends on content, but fresh, truly original materials are hard to find. Most of the articles we read are compilations, versions of other materials already published a few dozens if not hundred of times on the web. Where’s the novelty? Just in words…

The online mechanism that defines free article marketing consists in the submission or publication of unique materials in article directories, forums, social networks, newsletters, press releases, white papers and the like. But where do all these materials come from? Not every publisher or web developer is a writer; content is usually outsourced and often modified through software programs called article spinners that come up with new versions of a unique article, paragraph by paragraph. The eagerness to produce more and more such materials is that articles create backlinks pointing to the official website.

The direct consequence of backlinking is traffic increase, page rank increase and more prospects. Uniqueness of content is not the same thing with originality; every material can be relevant for free article marketing as long as the word order, the sentences and the paragraphs are arranged in a new form. From this perspective, we are witnessing a deterioration in the quality of the content distributed around the world wide web. Real originality in writing still defines news articles. Controversies, debates and informative materials about events remain the breath of fresh air in Internet free article marketing.

In fact the most successful at free article marketing are websites with informative content; those pages that keep readers informed on events, trends, innovations and the like. Blogs are another example of fresh content sources. Blogs focus on niches; they began as online diaries and a way for people to express their beliefs, opinions, thoughts and feelings. They are now one of the most powerful sides of the Internet, and they continue to grow. With every new entry, a blogger pushes web content a step further.

Originality, not uniqueness, remains the true heart of the Internet, and if marketers want to succeed on the long term, they should produce content that is totally new and fresh, at least once in a while. Nobody is interested in reading the same thing in other words, and even if these are tricks to achieve business exposure, they still need to be backed up by quality.

There are several things you can do to increase traffic for a website: build links, list the website in directories, write articles to create backlinks, write press releases, work on social networks, develop forum and blog activity, perform regular search engine optimization, and the list goes on. I’ll briefly refer to some of these to just pinpoint how strategies can increase the number of web surfers that land on a specific web page.

Link building!

A web surfer visits a page and after going through the content, he/she checks relevant links to expand the search. This is how web visitors from other web pages reach yours. But you continuously need to improve link building, particularly to achieve one-way links. The more links you get from related websites, the bigger the chances to increase traffic.

Search engine optimization!

Try to think like your customers! Be a customer! Do this whenever you select keywords to perform search engine optimization. You can’t increase traffic if you don’t know what people want, what they would be interested in. Unique keywords, longer keyword phrases could make the difference between success and failure when it comes to traffic. Closely monitor your keywords in order to see which appear more frequently in queries. Those will be your little gold mine!

Article marketing

Write articles and distribute them across the web to increase traffic by superior business exposure. Most marketers are now fully aware of the importance of content for the success of their business; word goes by backlinks. People reach a website by navigating from link to link, and you can significantly increase traffic by providing fresh, original content on a regular basis. Most article directories that provide submission services are free; hence you invest close to nothing, yet you gain immensely.

Forums and social networks

You can increase traffic by posting comments on forums and social networks. Every entry should include your signature with a link to your website so that the interested reader could check the page. It is important to follow the publication rules so that you don’t have your comments deleted by forum moderators.

Okay, so you increase traffic, but it doesn’t stop here. You have to push things forward over and over again, meaning that it is never enough. A higher number of visitors only means that some of them will perform a transaction, and from this group, an even smaller percent will actually buy something. This is why you have to keep your website attractive for relevant web surfers.