How to Increase Your Website Traffic

Why to have a nice website, blog or an online store if you don't have any visitor? More traffic means more sales, more readers, it will be easier to make money, to spread your ideas, to share your creativity and more...

Here are some tips to help you increase traffic to your site:

1) Add a Blog to your website

My first website was static and I was disappointed as I had only few visitors per month. Once that I decided to add a blog to it and write some useful articles related to my static content, I become surprised by the traffic that Google sent to my site only after some days and more after some weeks! That was a great change and I was encouraged to write more as some readers wrote comments under my posts.

So if you want to increase your website traffic, my first advice is that you should start a blog on your website if you didn't have it yet. Many free Blog engines exist over Internet like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and many other. WordPress, the one I use, is very easy to install and use if you never used a blog engine.

2) Write an unique content

The content is king. The most important thing in SEO is the content. If you want to increase your website traffic, if you want more visitors, you need to create an unique and interesting content with good keywords. Note that you will write content for both humans and search engines, so it is important to chose pertinent keywords in your article titles as well as in your content.

You can also write a controversial article or create a "top 10" list, that should bring a lot of traffic to your website.

What I tried is to publish interviews with some "guru" in my niche and that was very beneficial! Many made links to these interviews.

3) Freebies

Another strategy I used to increase my website traffic, is to offer free stuff. People like and are looking for freebies. Depends of your niche, but in my case, free website templates (with a link to my site in the footer) was available on my site for download and a lot of people came just for that. Note also that if you are offering freebies, many people will make links to your website! If you are selling premium themes/templates, make some free ones, that will attract visitors to your site and they might be interested by the premium ones! ;)

You can also write an eBook (pdf file) with links to your website and release it with a download link. If the content is valuable and unique, for sure people will share and recommend it and that will bring traffic to your website.

4) Videos / screencasts

Once again, depends of your niche, but you have to know that people like videos, some/many of them don't like read articles, so another strategy is making videos or screencasts. You can submit your video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) for free and then insert them into your article, or you can use a free software called CamStudio (http://camstudio.org/) to create your screencast and put the file on your server. It is a powerfull way to increase the traffic to your website!

5) Social Bookmarking Sites

Today social bookmaking sites have become a must and if you want regular visitors to your website, you should used them. One I'm using and bring me instant traffic to my site is StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/). If your article or website content is interesting, many could stumble it and you should get a very good traffic only some seconds after you submitted it! When I say "very good traffic" that means more than one hundred unique visitors in few minutes! Don't forget to ask to your friends to stumble your articles!

Another great social bookmarking sites are Digg (http://www.digg.com/), Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/) and Delicious (http://delicious.com/).

6) SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

If you want receive search engine traffic, don't forget to create an unique content, this is the most important thing in SEO.

You should also build backlinks. Backlinks are incoming links to your website or web pages. You need to have as many websites linking to your website as possible. Try to have backlinks from relevant websites with an high pagerank if possible. Backlinks from websites with the same theme is important.

Another good way to increase your website traffic is to join online forums and put a link to your website in your signature.

7) Web and article directories

Web directories enable you to have a link to your website in the related category. There are free and paid directories. Most of the free web directories require a reciprocal link. Paid directories will ask you some dollars for a persistent link. A new kind of directory are bid directories like http://www.bidseolink.com that functions like an auction for links. Advertisers with the highest bids have links listed higher on the directory and, thus, have a greater chance of being clicked on by visitors. Submit your link in web directories will give more backlinks to your website. It is another way to increase your website traffic.

8) Targeted traffic

Another solution to increase your website traffic is using paid traffic services.

How it works? Service like Growstats uses a network of publishers who post full-sized pop-under ads. The result is that your website is opened in a new browser window for the visitor. For less than several dollars you can send more than 10,000 real visitors to your website. Some services allow you to select a category to target visitors by a certain niche. You can also specify the country or region that the traffic will arrive.

This article doesn't cover all possibilities to get more traffic to your website but it is a good start! Just have a try!