The strategies used by web marketers to increase free traffic seem like a gold mine; however, not everybody manages to convert visitors into customers. In fact, 90% if not more of website visitors don’t convert into clients. Many people use the Internet for information only. They want to read news or get details on a specific problem, but they don’t want to buy anything. The real deal is to manage to convince as many people as possible to act on a website and ultimately perform a purchase.

Many mistakes are made when trying to increase free traffic, and the biggest problems appear when people use black hat tactics to promote their businesses. Many website owners have found their pages banned by search engines because the companies they collaborated with used dishonest promotional tactics. Lots of problems also appear because of the tough competition. The big issue comes from the fact that both you and your competitors target the same web surfers or market segment. And there is seldom a fair share in this!

Let’s take for instance the two Google advertising programs: Adwords and Adsense. A huge level of fraudulent activity has been registered for both. In the case of Adwords, when you increase free traffic you can lose lots of money when you get many irrelevant clicks on the ads. A dishonest practice here used by competitors was to hire people to click on the ads of other businesses with the deliberate purpose of causing money waste. The other extreme was registered with Adsense where Google pays the website owner for every click on an ad. Some web marketers use the strategy of multiple clicks to make more money.

As it happens with everything else in life, there are two sides of the coin, and the same holds true for every attempt to increase free traffic. The choice of methods, strategies and approach influence the success of the business as such, and positive results appear only for highly relevant web visitors. Therefore, you have to do your best in order to target web surfers that are most likely to convert into customers.

Numerous web pages provide guidance for traffic increase, link building, search engine optimization strategies, article marketing and the like. All these are closely interrelated in a complex network; what you do with one influences the rest. Keep this in mind because full understanding of the bigger picture keeps you on top!

High search rankings have a big relevance for business; they represent a sum of the ‘qualities’ that a website has according to the classification performed by search engines. A huge number of factors are taken into consideration by SE when giving the search rank, and although the criteria used remain secret of the trade, web masters have managed to understand how high search rankings can be achieved on the long run. SEO, keyword density, links and their importance, web design and content quality are essential for achieving a good position on search engines.

Search engine optimization

The relevance of the keywords for your domain, product or service plays a very important part when it comes to high search rankings. Pay attention to use unique keywords, use them in titles, headlines, tags and meta tags, and make sure the overall distribution of keywords in page content is not spammy. You could lose your top result page position if you don’t perform SEO regularly, due to the fact that some keywords may go inactive or fail to trigger relevant traffic.

Link building

Links define the popularity of a website online. The more websites link back to you naturally, the better your position with search engines. Great success comes from those pages that get links from very popular sites that already have high search rankings. Constantly work to increase the number of links and never lower the quality of the materials you publish in favor of quantity. Better fewer but top-notch than many and invaluable.

Web design

It is a clear fact that websites with a simple user-friendly design attract more visitors and win popularity. Loyalty is built in time, but it is of paramount importance for your website to be easily accessed. Keep navigation simple, include a site map and allow visitors to perform web searches from your page. Web design appears only indirectly related to high search rankings, but there is great relevance for this aspect too. A website using too advanced Java code, built around a deep structure is more difficult to index by search engine crawlers.

We generally refer to high search rankings as defining the first two search result pages on search engines. Web surfers usually stop to the second web result page before initiating a new query. Mention must be made that Google may have different criteria of indexation and page ranking as compared to Yahoo! and the rest of SE.

Free traffic results from good search engine optimization of a website. It all starts with the keywords that define your product, service, concept or business in general. If you select the most relevant, they will attract those web surfers that could eventually turn into business prospects. Free traffic also results from the submission of quality content in article directories. Numerous marketing strategies are put to work for the sole purpose of increasing the number of people that reach a particular website. And every online developer needs to achieve such a goal!

All the tasks performed for web promotion are interrelated. We can’t talk about search engine optimization or link building, without touching on page ranking and free traffic. There is a close connection between each of these. If you manage to create a good reputation online, and continue to grow in popularity, search engines love you, websites link back to you naturally and the number of visitors increases proportionately. It is most important to start well and never put marketing efforts on hold. Website promotion and free traffic increase are an ongoing job.

A unilateral approach to online marketing could be very limiting, from the business growth perspective. This is the reason why experts advise web marketers to combine strategies, approaches and techniques in order to achieve their development goals on the Internet. There’s no better way. Moreover, the way you start working on your business, also matters a great deal. Many people fail in the attempt to attract free traffic because some errors may have appeared somewhere along the way.

A website that is too complex may not be user-friendly enough, even if the product or service it promotes is top quality. This is just an example of mistakes that can hold you back from the very beginning. The situation can be fixed by professionals but it takes time and money. If you’re just launching your business on the Internet, make sure you enter the market in a positive way without any disadvantages whatsoever. Free traffic builds on quality, and once you manage to develop loyalty in your visitors, you have made the step towards success.

There are very numerous strategies to increase free traffic and they are widely described and discussed online, in articles, e-books, e-guides, on forums and social networks. There is quite a lot to learn from such sources, consequently, reading can help you avoid serious business mistakes.

When you try to increase free traffic to your website, you definitely need to work on quality problems. Search engines depend on content; it has to be unique, well written and non-spammy. Before you take up web business promotion, it is useful to check the rules by which Google, Yahoo! and Bing play. Web masters have even created lists with the strategies that will increase page rank as well as with the schemes considered unacceptable with search engines. Such data could be really convincing for any web marketer, because there is always something new to learn on the Internet.

Publish quality content in order to increase free traffic to your website. It’s not enough to write an article or two and post them on site without making any further improvements. Just imagine a visitor’s reaction when it accesses your website and sees that all the articles are from 2008. No updates? No fresh content? Is this business still functional? Wouldn’t you wonder the same things? Therefore, periodical content refreshing works wonders to increase free traffic to your website. Moreover, search engines will give you a better ranking if you keep providing relevant information.

The methods to increase free traffic to your website clearly oppose strategies that involve the purchase of links or pay-per-clicks. Although paid links appear like a great solution to get access to superior traffic levels without much effort, they are a short-term solution, and there may be serious consequences if the links you pay for are poor quality. If you get links from link farms, search engines will react negatively to your website. Therefore, I suggest that you focus on those hard-work tactics that allow you to increase free traffic to your website on the long run.

It costs you nothing to post comments in forums or on chats and include links to your website. Another cost-free way to get more web visitors is by newsletters and referrals. You should reward those customers that refer your website to friends, further spreading the word about your business. The efforts to increase free traffic to your website are multilateral, no doubt about that. Holding to one strategy alone does not allow for full business development, and eventually leads to failure due to the incomplete adaptation to the demands of the electronic market.

Be flexible in planning and open to new tendencies because adaptability will work into your advantage, drawing more and more traffic from search engines.