While traffic on the road makes you late, bored and frustrated, traffic to your website makes you right on time for many new opportunities.

A lot of work goes in to creating a new website.  Once it finally goes live that’s when you can sit back and relax.

Right?  Bu-bum.

Actually that’s when you need to get busy with your online marketing activities to generate the web traffic needed to achieve your website objectives.
Ways to Generate Web Visitors and Drive Traffic to your Website.

Getting on Page One of Google

Appearing on the front page of Google when someone searches on a topic that’s relevant to your website means that loads of people see your website and click-through to visit it, increasing your web traffic.

The two ways to get on page one of Google are by using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to appear in the organic search results on the left hand side of the search engine results page (SERP) or by using Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to pay for your website to be shown in the Sponsored Links section of the SERP.

Getting on page one of Google using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation covers everything that you do to your website to help it appear high up in organic search engine results.  SEO takes time and commitment but has a great payback in the long term in terms of the potential web traffic that you can get.

There are a lot of things that you can do to optimise your website for search engines.  I’ve listed some of the important areas below.

• Building external Links. Have links from a lot of other websites back to your website. This shows that your website is credible and reputable, especially links from high ranking, authoritative websites like government sites.  Building links is called “Off Page SEO”.
• Using keywords in your content, in the right places. Using keywords in your content that are the same as the keywords used by people searching in Google makes your website relevant to what the searcher is looking for.  Use keywords in Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, URLs, Headings, Subheadings, Body Text and as Link Text.  Optimising your website content for search engines is called “On Page SEO”.
• Having a lot of web pages. The more pages you have, the more important your website becomes; and the more keywords you can spread throughout the website. Having a blog allows you to add articles easily on a regular basis. Each article adds a page of web content to your site.
• Having a lot of website visitors and a high volume of traffic. Ah the irony, how do you get traffic? First you’ve got to have traffic! The aim of your website is to attract visitors, and the amount of visitors you get also helps your search engine ranking; as does the amount of visitors who return frequently, and the time they spend reading your web content.

Time in existence of a website is also important. Just because your new website is live, doesn’t mean that it instantly appears in Google. It can take a few weeks before a new website is indexed for the first time.  It needs to be indexed before it shows up in search engine results.

Once indexed, it takes time and ongoing activity to improve your website’s organic search engine ranking by building external links, writing optimised web copy, increasing the amount of pages on your website and using other ways to drive traffic.

Getting on page one of Google using Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is paying for an advertisement about your website to appear in the “Sponsored Links” section of a search engine results page. Google’s Search Engine Marketing program is called “AdWords”. While SEO can take time to increase your web traffic, SEM is a good way to get a new website of page one of a search engine quickly and increase your traffic.  And over time, more traffic improves your organic ranking.

More ways to generate visitors and drive traffic to your website

Aim to have ongoing activities that drive a regular flow of new and repeat visitors to your website.

Social Media Marketing (SMM).

Social Media Marketing is using websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to market your website.  By using SMM to engage your target audience you can build relationships and increase your web traffic. If you’re one of the many people who don’t really get how SMM can benefit you, I was too not so long ago! We’ll walk through some things you can do that help make SMM work for your business and increase your web traffic.

Email Marketing.

In one way or another, every email that you send from your business markets your business.  Email Marketing refers to using email to market your product, service, promotion or event on a larger scale, to a list of people who have an interest in your product or service. Having a facility to build a database that you have permission to email is one of most important aspects of your website.  Aside from being a cost effective way to spread the word about whatever you’re promoting, every time someone clicks on a link in your email and visits your website, they increase your web traffic.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll also want to know the Secret to Getting Repeat Visitors to Your Website.

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