Traffic Building Techniques – Drive Traffic And Attract Visitors

In order for an online business to continue to make money, it must drive traffic and attract visitors who click on advertisements or purchase products. What methods you use in order to attract visitors depends on what kind of website you run, personal, blog, company, etc.

The basics are essential

Regardless of what industry you’re in and who your target market is in order to attract, and most importantly retain, visitors you need need to have a solid foundation for your website to stand on.

When starting out, choose a domain that fits your website; the name of your business, the genre of your blog, or your name (a psuedo-name even) will give an easy-to-remember domain for visitors.

Proper spelling and grammar are a must for visitors to return. Though a website appearing unprofessional may attract many unique visitors, they won’t stay long on the site, won’t click ads, and are unlikely to return. Most importantly, proper written language is key for information dissemination, which is why you have a website to begin with.

Internet Advertising Works!

Webmasters should never give up on traditional methods of online advertising. Text-ads (more famously, Google adWords) is an effective traffic producer when used properly. Though, webmasters may incur a high cost to use this type of advertising, usually companies only charge when your ads are clicked. Hypothetically, you will still receive visitors from people who viewed your ad, but did not click it. Just out of my experience with this system, I have seen a substantial increase of visitors stemming from adWords advertising.

A second option is to start an affiliate program. If you don’t have a large advertising budget, affiliate programs are a perfect solution. They cost nothing to start (unless you purchase a script to handle tracking) and you only need to worry about paying people if an affiliate leads to a sale. Unfortunately, this option is unavailable to most bloggers, since in order to run an affiliate program you need to have a product or service to sell.

Though primarily found on a bygone era of the internet, Web Rings and Directories are still a viable marketing solution. For the most part, the listing fees are either low or non-existent. Though compared to other advertising methods it is ineffective (resulting in only a few additional visitors a month) the low cost justifies this method.

Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Using proper search engine optimization increases your organic visitors through search engines by making your site appear sooner on search results. Essentially, SEO is about making your websites as easy as possible for search engine spiders to crawl. Having an easy means for spiders to navigate your website should be a top priority for webmasters. A highly ranked website will have links, at the bottom of each page, to the most important pages on the site. A text-based site-map should list every single page and can be quite basic as in SEO the site-map’s main purpose is to help spiders – not lost visitors.

Other things that can increase your search engine rankings are the meta tags located in the head section of your design. Properly using these tags will give search engines additional keywords to categorize your site while not affecting the visual design of your site.

Latest Headlines

• WebMaster – TASC – Chantilly, VA
• The Weekend’s Big List of Domains At Auction and Dropping on the Net
• Webmaster at Plan B Solutions (Los Angeles, CA)
• WebMaster at Tasc (Chantilly, VA)
• Webmaster – oDesk – Lewisville, TX
• Webmaster (P/T) – JESNA: Jewish Education Service of North America – New York, NY
• KeyDrive S.A. Acquires Moniker and SnapNames from Oversee.net (PR)
• Webmaster – Haley Stuart LLC – Montvale, NJ
• Analytical SEO/SEOP Webmaster Needed at Elance.com (Orlando, FL)
• Web Developer / Webmaster – Metro MSR – Washington, DC