Your website is up and you’re ready for business, but how do you get the traffic to come to you? Here are a few ways to get traffic pretty quickly:
Submit to search engines: this is essential! As of 2009 there were approximately 234 million websites and approximately 128,000 new websites each day! Search engine bots are hard at work scanning websites and the likelihood of a bot finding your new site soon are slim. You have to announce to them that you exist and the process will happen much faster. Submit to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Once your site is indexed, you will appear in relevant search results. If your business has a physical location you will also want to get listed in Google Places (requires phone verification), Yahoo Local and Bing Local (requires address verification by mail).
Social media: it’s time to jump on the bandwagon if you haven’t already. Most social media profile pages are updated more often than websites, thus indexed more frequently and appearing higher up in search results. By having a website, Facebook fanpage and a twitter page you will appear in more search engine results. These mediums also introduce you and your business to a whole new set of people that you wouldn’t ordinarily come across. There are many other networks to also consider, Merchant Circle, LinkedIn, Biznik, which will help you get seen even more. Are you thinking this is a lot of upkeep? Don’t worry! While you’re setting up your profiles you can add in you twitter feed, blog feed and others, so your profile automatically updates.
Get relative backlinks: submit your website into industry related directories, city business directories and any group or association directories you may belong to. This will put you in yet another place, but very targeted. If a potential customer is looking for a certified professional, they often will go to the certification company directly and look through their directory. Same goes for a city, if you want to see all of the bakeries, window cleaners or mechanics in one town then look in that towns business directory, some cities have more than one.
Comment on blogs and forums: find some blogs you love to read, they could be industry related, about marketing, sales, advertising, finances, etc. Comment on some posts you like or even disagree with. Most news websites also allow comments on each news story. You can also find some forums that are relative to what you do – this is a great way to learn about what works for others. All of these mediums have the option to include a link to your website in the signature of your comment.
Write a blog: a blog is a way to show your expertise in your field. Readers can learn about what you do, how you do it and learn about you. Read this post for more reasons on why you should write a blog. If you don’t want to maintain a blog you could submit a guest blog to a website.
The above are all important, but these next items are important for the long term.
Keyword research: each page in your website should have a meta description and keywords. This is not to be taken lightly. When search engines start to see your website becoming more important you will rank higher in keyword search results. Really think hard about your target market and your specialties. Make a list of keywords and then research to see which are more popular. Use the most popular in your keywords and include some in your description. Your description is what shows up in search results under your page name.
Title images appropriately: don’t forget about image searches! If you’re selling a product this is important. An image name should be specific and descriptive. For example, a small blue truck could be truck-blue-small.jpg a large red truck, truck-red-large.jpg. By doing this not only will your product appear in relevant search results. but your image files will be organized you can quickly find them.
Google analytics: find out how many visitors you are getting. Google Analytics supplies you with massive amounts of statistics about your website such as number of visitors, which pages are viewed, which links are clicked on pages, which browsers visitors use, keyword content, how long visitors are on your site, what websites refer traffic and much more. Setup is fairly simple and worth doing. After you have stats for a period of time you can evaluate the statistics and make some changes to better your site. You should see which page most people exit your site from, see why they may be leaving and make some changes to that page. Also see what sites refer you traffic, spend more or less time putting effort into that referring site to get more or leas traffic from it.
All of these are very important when gaining valuable traffic. Feel free to ask me any questions in effort to get you more business. If you simply do not have the time or patience then contact me and I can do it for you.
Cheers to you and your website!
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I liked this list and to the point facts about how to generate more web traffic. The classes I’ve taken on social media/internet marketing all went over the same stuff so it’s nice to know what I’m being taught is actually in practice
I shared this via twitter 
Carissa, you always have some of the best advice. I tell you, I always learn something from one of your posts. It helps me a ton. Thank you!
Great info! gave me some ideas of things I am not doing, as well as some refined ideas of what I AM doing. Shared this via twitter, thank you so much for the tips!
Carissa,
The power of LinkedIn worked for me as I met you through this social network entity. Thank God for people like you. I feel that I can trust you. Your services have been great for me professionally. My website looks much better and is user friendly for viewers. The next steps will take me to higher heights in terms of visibility, thanks to you and your professional services. I looked into other services before deciding on yours, and I am certain that I made the right choice. You have been very patient with a novice website user. Thanks so much!!
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