Ideas for Building Website Traffic: Free
There are various ways in which you can build traffic to your website over time without spending any money.
There are two distinct methods that you can use, these are onsite and offsite. Onsite changes are those that you make to your site itself. Offsite, in contrast and as the name suggests, are things that you do outside of your site to drive traffic to it.
Onsite Traffic Building Tips
The easiest way to build traffic to your site is to ensure that your content and pages are fit for purpose. Ensure that all pages are focused on a particular topic, well written and with original content. Keep material as fresh as you can.Also try to constantly add new content to your site - search engines love this, so if you can make a policy of steadily adding content each week then you will reap the benefits. Also consider that the more content and pages you have, the more material there is for search engines to index.
Just like when you read a book of five hundred pages you are more likely to find a range of words in the index than if you read a book of ten pages, so if you have a larger website there is likely to be more variety in content, more information to be indexed, and consequently a greater opportunity for your site to come up in searches for a wider range of terms. And that, put simply, means more traffic.
What you should always avoid doing is the temptation to rush out content for the sake of it. Only add content that is relevant and you feel will add value - and also avoid the temptation to buy content or use it from various content directories... information that appears elsewhere (so-called 'duplicate content') is worthless to your site.
Offsite Traffic Building Tips
There are many free forums out there - and probably some that are related to your business. So join them and post about your site. Offer useful information and tips on relevant subjects and suggest that visitors come to your site for more information (but never post purely for the purpose of promoting your site - you won't be popular for long!).Getting links is also an important way of helping increase the exposure for your site and the traffic it receives in the long term. Therefore consider submitting to relevant business directories, and if possible consider approaching those who runs sites related to yours to link to you - perhaps related but non-competitive services are they are more likely to create the link. Have a very personal approach as many people use automated tools to try to get links or exchange links which have a much lower success rate - the polite, personal and human approach is much more likely to work!
You can also consider submitting, or giving visitors the option of submitting, your content pages to Digg and other human-rated news/article directories whereby those articles that get Digged the most appear higher on the Digg site and can generate huge amounts of traffic to you.
There is reams of literature, articles and opinions on how to build traffic to your site and a lot of this focuses on Search Engine Optimisation - the process of making your website as attractive to search engines as possible. However, you should always bear in mind that, at the end of the day, the visitors to your site are humans. If you make your site as useful and easy to use as possible to the humans that visit it, you won't go too far wrong in search engines eyes either.
If you would like other ways to boost site traffic that may be quicker, it's time to read paid ways of building site traffic.
This guide to building a business ecommerce site is by Clarity Media Ltd
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
