To get sales of your product or subscribers to your service or
newsletter, then you need to get traffic, as without traffic you will
not get either.
Yet
generating website traffic is one of the hardest things to do, sure you
may get lucky and invent the next Facebook or Twitter, but for the vast
amount of websites then getting traffic is not easy. Indeed a lot of
people who build their own websites struggle just to get their sites
indexed in Google.
If generating traffic was easy we would all be Internet millionaires!
So if you have a website, or want to start one then how do you go about getting traffic?
Well there are two ways in which to do this, buy it or carry out Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in order to gain free traffic.
Buying
traffic can bring goods results if your site converts its sales well,
but can cost you dearly if it does not. There are various forms of what
we can class as "Paid" traffic, from buying banner ad space on other
sites through to using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. Depending on how much
you are prepared to spend then using paid traffic can bring in lots of
traffic fast, but it is only the PPC traffic that is likely to be
targeted and result in sales. Avoid buying in offers of 10,000 visitors
for $20 etc. as you have no idea of where these visitors are being
generated from, and you may find that major search engines actually mark
your site down as a result of this traffic.
SEO is the best way
to generate large volumes of free, targeted traffic that will keep
coming to your website month after month, long after your PPC campaigns
have ended.
SEO takes a lot of skill due to the large number of
factors involved in relation to your websites on page and off page
optimisation, and in addition the search engines are always changing
their ranking algorithms, which means the factors involved in SEO are
also ever-changing.
If you have built your own website then there
is quite a bit you can carry out yourself, however if you are
considering getting a website built by a web development company then it
is worth looking at what SEO services they offer in order to help you
generate long-term free traffic. A good web design company may not offer
the Search Engine Optimisation services that a web development company
does.
The first may help you just design your site, whilst the
latter designs it and then helps generate traffic to it, and traffic is
key to making sales.
Website traffic
Generating
off page traffic can involve a very wide variety of activities from
blog posting, posting on related forums, article promotion, press
releases, ezine articles, and newsletters to name but a few.
Bad
traffic generation methods to be avoided are banner exchanges - you have
no idea where your banner is being displayed, link farms, bulk traffic
purchases, and buying in poor quality back links, all of which can
negatively affect your site's popularity.