Webupon

It’s a pretty fantastic feeling having your first website go live, this could be months of communicating with your developers or creating it yourself from scratch. Once your new website goes live, it will be joining the hundreds of millions of websites already up and competing a little slice of traffic. The good news is there is plenty of traffic to go around however finding it and making your site visible to the internet user is the key.

The secret to getting visitors to your website is by tweaking and optimizing certain aspects of it. Here is a short and simple list of things you can do to increase traffic to your website.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – By fine tuning and tweaking your site, it will start ranking higher amongst the Search Engines out there like Google and Yahoo. A properly optimized site can be the difference between 1-2 visitors or a few thousand a month. There are some great sites out there which offer this service for you at no charge, they go through your website and see how you can fine tune its SEO. A good place to start would be www.salsanet.co.uk for a free evaluation of your website.
2. Link Exchanges – Link exchanges are a great way to increase the traffic to your website, it involves having a link on your website to another and on that website there is a link to yours. This generates organic and natural traffic which can help boost your search engine rankings. The best thing is, this it totally free and there is no limit to how many link exchanges you can have from your site.
3. Pay Pay Click Campaigns (PPC) - This is an effective service offered by most search engines to drive traffic to your website. You basically bid for keywords that relate to the content on your site and this is the price you pay when a user clicks through to your site. Google and Yahoo PPC keywords are generally a lot more expensive however you can set a daily spending limit for your ads.
4. Writing New Content and Articles – Another great way to get people visiting your website is by providing new content, usually in the form of articles. Writing an informative article which brings attention to your business or ideas can be very effective. Once you’ve written your articles, submit them to online article directories and sites such as ezine. Include a link in your “about the author” box at the bottom of the article so people can link through to your site. The added link-backs will also help with SEO.
5. Buying web traffic – This is not a wholly organic or natural way to drive people to your site but can be just as effective. There are many web traffic campaigns online that will target your websites audience for you.
6. Newsletters - Newsletters can be a great way to bring a human touch to your website. This will also encourage a community interaction between your readers and the site. Some newsletters are sent once a month, some once a week, it just depends on your time constraints, your readers will enjoy hearing a personal story or introduction to some new content on your site.
7. Swapping Banners - Banner Exchanges are work wonders for your website traffic because they are so visual and stand out more. In the same way you can apply link exchanges, you can also apply banners to your site from other sites. Your banners will then appear on their sites.
8. Layout - Take some time to look at how your site is laid out, is it easy to navigate, are the menus clear or confusing? You want to make you site easy to navigate so visitors also come back once they’ve arrived. Spending some time freshening up and de-cluttering your front page will have a positive effect on the number of people which return to your site. You certainly want new people visiting your site, but you also want them to come back right? So keep it fresh, and don’t let it stagnate, new content each week would also be a good idea.

So there you have it, a few tips to increase your website traffic. Spending time on these will work wonders for your site. Search engines can take time to index all the changes you make on your site so chances are you won’t see massive traffic spikes overnight. Best of luck in optimizing your website and heres hoping for many new visitors your way!