Four Strategies to Increase Website Traffic

If you own a website, you know the importance to getting visitors to your site. Frankly, lack of website visitor growth will mean lower sales and business. The biggest obstacle to getting traffic is competing with the millions of other websites on the internet. There are many ways to get traffic that include both free and paid traffic. This article will discuss four proven strategies to increase your website traffic.

First, you should consider developing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Research has shown that consumers are seven times more likely to purchase a product when they find the product through organic search rather than paid search. This rationale increases the importance of being ranked on the first page of Google, yahoo and MSN searches for your product keywords. The SEO process will allow you to tailor your website to get higher rankings in search engines. You will look to optimize your page titles, Meta description tags and other items to improve your ranking. Many times it is better to hire an SEO partner to conduct this process for you.

Secondly, you should focus on the keywords that consumers use to find your website. This is where you can identify what keywords consumer will search for that will potentially lead them to your site. The most important thing to consider is to focus on relevant keywords. Many website owners look at what the most popular keywords that consumers are searching for to find a solution. For example, if your website is selling real estate in Orange County, CA don't focus upon "real estate" as your keyword because it has the greatest amount of searches. You would want to get more specific and use something like "Orange County real estate" as a more relevant keyword.

Third, you want to submit your website address to internet directories. To get your website listed on Google can take several weeks to months because Google does not rush into adding just any website to their directory. In contrast, you can get listed on Yahoo rather quickly if you are willing to pay $250 to be listed. The best alternative to spend up the process is to submit to other directories that Google likes to use for new websites. I would suggest you submit your website to Best of the Web (BOTW), JoeAnt and Gimpsy. With a little luck, your website will be listed on Google in days after you are accepted to one of these directories.

The fourth strategy is to increase the amount of inbound links to your website. Here you can exchange links with other websites but be sure that reciprocal links are 30% or less of the total links. If greater than 30%, your site will be penalized in the search engine rankings. There are numerous ways to get free inbound links such as getting links through social media websites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube and many more.

You can also write articles relevant to your topic and post them on article content sites such as Ezinearticles.com. These articles should have a link to your website so as they are distributed by other users the links point back to your site. Also, you may want to consider using press releases to create links to your site and you may want to write a blog to create more inbound links. Lastly, you can monitor your links at Google by typing "link:www.yourwebsite.com" into the search box. This will show a list of the links to your website and can be monitored over time.

These four strategies will definitely increase the amount of traffic coming to your website. It is important to realize that these traffic strategies should be ongoing so you continue to maintain and improve your search engine rankings.