How to Attract Website Traffic
Build it and then will come. Once the rallying cry of those who were willing to take chances in life and reach for the stars on big ideas. On the web, that translated into fill a website with high quality content and they would come. Using a bunch of good search phrases and in the HTML would bring you lots of traffic. At least that was the theory.
That wasn’t completely true. If you failed to optimize your pages for not only your product but related ways of referring to the product searchers would not be able to find you. So, all the great content in the world wasn’t going to help if the pages weren’t optimized.
Optimization matters but as search engine algorithms evolve they started to place less emphasis on optimization and more on having other sites linking to yours. The more quality inbound links, the more important the site. So, how to get those links?
Reciprocal links were very popular and effective at one time but they have lost their value. Once people started setting up link farms with links from across the spectrum, they lost any value. The search engine algorithms adjusted to drop the value of sites trading irrelevant links. Links now need to be one-way unpaid links relevant to the topic of the site. They get the search engines ‘vote of confidence’.
The theory is that if you have great content other sites will link to you. Other people will follow the links, read your site and then link also. Sounds good but, that is not really common. There is more wrong than right with that theory.
The first and most obvious problem is, how do you get people to the site in the first place? Without incoming links, the search engines ignore you. Second, will those visitors who manage to find you without already having established inbound links, have websites to even link to you from, assuming they want to. Most visitors don’t have sites nor do they know how to link.
Serious webmasters tend to be stingy with their links. They hesitate to link to their competition. When inbound links count, providing links to competition increases their value without any returned value for the webmaster’s site.
So, if incoming links is the way to get more website traffic, what exactly is a webmaster to do. Paying for links, especially when you are just starting out is not practical and if the search engines like Google catch on, you could find yourself out of them.
Now, before you start thinking that building a great site with quality content is passe, think about what you are looking for when you go searching. You want to find sites that inform you about the subject you are searching on. When you find a high quality content site, you stay on it and explore, right? So, you still need to provide high quality content on your site.
A great way to get inbound links for your site is to create articles and post them to article directories. Once you’ve written all that great content, writing some articles can’t be that hard, can it? Once you attract some readers, some of them will even take the articles and put them on their website, voila!, one way link created.
Even better, if they want more, they will click the link in the article resource box and you’ll then have traffic too.
What is your favourite traffic magnet for your site?
