7 Sure-Fire Strategies for Building Traffic to Your Site

As a website owner, you can never have enough traffic, as more traffic generally results in more leads and more sales.  So if you’re struggling to get enough eyeballs on your site to generate the amount of interest and income you’re looking for, check out the following seven techniques to drive more of these valuable visitors to your site.

Strategy #1 – Deliver Great Content

The number one, “Golden Rule” of building and retaining traffic is to deliver great content.  Don’t simply regurgitate the same old, tired topics that every other site in your niche is covering – discuss new and exciting topics and put your own unique spin on them.

The thing that makes great content so valuable from a traffic generation standpoint is that it doesn’t just result in one-time visitors (although you’ll get plenty of those when your unique content is spread virally on social networking and social bookmarking sites).  Instead, what great content is useful for is in building up repeat visitors who come back to your site over and over again to hear what you have to say.  These loyal visitors often represent a substantial chunk of your site’s income, which is what makes attracting and retaining them with good content so valuable.

Strategy #2 – Target Good Keywords

Another important part of proper traffic strategy is ensuring that you’re targeting the right keywords for your site.  Most new webmasters dismiss the importance of “writing to the keywords”, but the truth is that these target phrases are what drive the Internet.  When people enter topics into the search engines, they’re entering keywords – and if you aren’t ranking well for the specific keywords they’re entering, you aren’t going to build sustainable traffic to your site.

To help your site be “found” by the right keywords in the search engines, use a free tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool (or one of the many paid pieces of software out there that offer more in-depth keyword statistics) to search for keywords in your niche that receive more than 500 exact match searches per month (at a minimum) and low competition, as based on the relative strength of their competitors in the Top 10 Google search.  Writing content based around these specific keywords will help your site to earn higher rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs), which will result in free traffic to your site.

Strategy #3 – Use Proper On-Page SEO

Of course, simply researching and targeting these low-competition, high-traffic keywords aren’t enough to guarantee high placement in the SERPs.  For maximum benefit, it’s also important to follow the established rules of on-page search engine optimization to increase the odds of our pages being ranked well.  The following are a few of the guidelines you should follow:

Include your target keyword throughout your page content. Don’t over-optimize (that is, don’t include your target keyword 15 different times within your page content), but do use your target keyword in your heading tags and body content in a way that makes sense and sounds natural.

Optimize your meta tags. Although the relative importance of these elements is minimal from an SEO standpoint, your title and description tags are generally pulled through to the SERPs in order to form the snippet that displays what your site is about.  Using your target keyword in these elements will help searchers decide that your content is the best fit for the keywords they’ve searched for.

Make use of keyword-rich internal links, bread crumb navigation and site navigation schemes that utilize your target keywords as anchor text. Not only will these features improve the user experience on your site by helping people find the information they’re looking for, they provide a valuable SEO benefit as well.

Strategy #4 – Build a Presence on Social Networks

Maintaining a strong presence on the most popular social networking sites in your niche is important for two reasons.  Not only do these sites provide an ideal environment to share your content and attract potential customers in a non-threatening (not too “salesy”) way, it’s also been confirmed that links from social networking sites count as a ranking factor in the Google and Bing search algorithms.

To take advantage of these benefits, it’s more important that you be consistent than that you stay on top of the “latest” Facebook and Twitter trends.  Commit at least 20 minutes a day to being helpful and active on social networking sites and you should see the results quickly in the form of more traffic to your site.

Strategy #5 – Guest Post on Related Sites

Guest posting on authority sites in your industry serves two purposes – not only will you get an influx of traffic from the site you post on (as your guest post essentially represents an endorsement of your brand by the site’s owner), you’ll also earn a high quality, highly relevant backlink to your site for your efforts.

To find authority sites to post on, simply Google your target keywords plus the words “guest post” or “guest author”.  Then, contact the owners of these sites with a proposed topic that’s based on content that has performed well on their sites in the past.  Once you’ve agreed upon a guest post topic, write up your content, code your HTML links into the text, submit it to the site owner and wait for visitors to come pouring into your site.

Strategy #6 – Host a Giveaway or Promotion

Nothing gets people’s attention like a giveaway or promotion!  One of the fastest ways to get people back to your site is to give them the opportunity to win something – even if it’s something as small as an Amazon gift card!  The following are just a few promotional contest ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

Ask your social networking followers to share their favorite piece of advice on your profile in exchange for a drawing entry.

Request that your readers share one of your articles on Facebook or Twitter, with all social shares counted as entries into your giveaway.

Enter everyone who comments on your most recent blog post into the giveaway drawing.

Of course, before launching any giveaway or promotion, be sure you’re in compliance with any applicable gambling laws, as well as the terms of service of Facebook, Twitter or any other sites you involve in the drawing.

Strategy #7 – Seed Your Content on Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites are tricky.  Some people submit every piece of content they create to these sites and never see a single visitor from their efforts, while other site owners receive tens of thousands of hits from an article that goes viral on a social bookmarking site.

To improve your odds of falling into the later camp, make an effort to be active on your favorite social bookmarking sites besides simply submitting your articles.  By investing time in becoming part of the community, you substantially improve your odds of having your content get picked up by other site owners, which can result in a huge burst of traffic back to your site.

Image: Hugo_Fsop