Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Getting More Traffic to Your Website

The biggest problem involved in running a website is trying to get large amounts of traffic to it. There are advertisements all over the internet promising the magical solution to give you large amounts of targeted traffic. There are many ways to boost traffic by paying money in hopes of getting results. There are also many other solutions that are free. The only real limit to free advertising strategies is your own imagination.

Most popular forums on the internet get at least a thousand unique hits a day. Since there are forums for every topic imaginable, you are sure to find a forum whose visitors are in your target market. This strategy only takes a few minutes a day and can bring in a large amount of traffic. On a forum that is related to your topic, register and add a creative advertisement in your signature. The key is to make the advertisement work is to make the forum members curious about your advertisement. By doing that, the members will be curious enough to click on the advertisement, thus delivering traffic to your website. It is important to make at least a couple of relevant posts in the forum with quality content in the posts. The more forums you use, the more traffic you can get.

Contact websites that are about the same topic as your own and offer to host an advertisement on your website in exchange for the website hosting an advertisement for your website. Don't get discouraged if some webmasters turn down your offer or don't respond. Keep trying and eventually you will get some webmasters who will want the extra advertising. The quality links will also help improve your search engine rankings which are an added bonus to this strategy.
One of the simplest strategies is also one of the most overlooked ones. Many people just expect their websites to appear in the major search engine listings. It is important to manually submit your website to as many search engines as possible. It may seem a waste of time to submit to smaller or newer search engines, but those can be a major source of web traffic. The smaller and newer search engines have less competition for the best keywords, giving you better search rankings. You never know which of the small or new search engines could become the next big thing, and if you already have solid rankings in those search engines, it is easier to maintain those solid rankings if any those search engines become the next Google.

Make sure that you add a good Meta description in your web page's source code along with good Meta tags. Use target keywords relevant to your website as well as keywords that are not commonly used for your topic. Make sure you use your main keywords in your Meta description as well as in your website title.