How to Boost Website Traffic in 2009
July 20th 2009 7:30 AM
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Achieving sustainable website traffic growth is best done using a combination of strategies and communications channels. Especially in the last year, we have seen the effectiveness of Social Media at generating website traffic explode. Techniques that were useful only several years ago have become obsolete, so what is effective today?
Here are 8 Great Ways to Improve Your Web Traffic in 2009:
1. Social Media
The effectiveness of social media at generating website traffic is growing exponentially. Why? That’s where your potential website visitors are. Just take a look at the Google Trends for Social Media yourself. A successful profile Twitter, YouTube, or Digg has become one of the best ways to drive website traffic.
Visitors from social media websites tend to browse quicker and have shorter attention spans than others. Ensure your website content is relevant to your Twitter profile and tweets, YouTube videos, and Diggs to keep visitors engaged.
2. Be Active Online
Participating in relevant forums, Blog Comments, Social Sites, newsgroups, and places where you can give advice such as Yahoo! Answers can be very rewarding. People will associate you with the topic you are talking about, and often become interested in learning more about you. This will lead them to visit your website and other links posted in your profiles and discussions.
The key things to keep in mind are to make sure any links you have in your profile are useful to the communities you interact with, and to avoid linking to your own website too often. Focusing on helping others and adding value to conversations will get you more visitors than just trying to help yourself.
3. Personal Interaction
Establishing relationships online is great. Keeping them there is not. Building personal relationships with helpful people you meet online is highly encouraged. You will gain better trust and confidence, which are major factors that play into whether someone will link to, talk about, or recommend you.
When you see a certain referrer is sending you quality traffic from their website, Twitter, or any other channel, pick up the phone! Your discussion will lead each of you to see each other as humans, not just pictures and words on a browser. This will usually lead to tighter alliances, and more willingness to help each other out.
4. Attend Industry Events
This is related to the personal interaction point above. Attending functions and events in the topic area of your website will provide you more exposure offline, which leads to more relevant traffic online. It is also a great way to meet people and establish new relationships both on and off the web.
5. Pay Per Click Marketing
Depending on your website objectives and your budget, pay per click campaigns can be a great way of driving targeted traffic. There are a few important things to keep in mind when using PPC. The first is to explore the various pay per click providers and channels and find which ones work best for you.
Search engines, banner, website, and video ads all vary in the quantity and quality of traffic they drive. It is up to you to find out what works best for your website.
The second thing to remember is creating optimized landing pages for each ad. This means testing various landing page combinations using A/B and multivariate testing to find out which landing page your visitors respond to best.
6. Link Bait
Having a raffle, competition, prizes, and viral YouTube videos on or that link to your website can generate an explosive growth in visits. This is a great way to attract many new visitors and associate your website with the link bait.
If it is very funny, exciting, rewarding, or useful, that is what your website will be associated with as well. It is also a great way to add value to your site and keep your existing visitors engaged and happy.
7. Search Engine Optimization
The priority of your website should be creating a great experience and optimizing it for your human visitors, not search engines. That being said, there are many things you can do to make it more visible to search engines and drive up your traffic, without impacting your visitor experience. A comprehensive and well-written Overview of SEO was written by SEOmoz.
One thing I will say is that Link Building has become a very important factor to rank at the top of search engines you should focus on.
8. Web Analytics
What you should be using web analytics for is determining which strategies are driving the highest amount of visitor traffic. This lets you spend more of your time improving what is working for you, and avoid wasting your time on tasks that are producing poor results.
In my case, I’ve used web analytics to determine that Twitter is driving more traffic for me than my other strategies. As a result, I am presently using analytics to determine what content and articles my Twitter visitors read most, so I can optimize the site for this traffic segment.
How do you drive traffic to your website? What strategies and channels have worked best for you so far? How have they changed in the last few years? Please share your thoughts below
As late as this weekend I decided to give Twitter a try. Other than that I agree with you about being personal and link bait. Link bait have shown already how successful you can become if you use it right.
Stefan´s last blog ..Find Me at Twitter
Thanks for this list.
I would also suggest offline marketing as a good means of gaining website traffic. Of course, the hits come much more slowly through this method. And it is more expensive than online methods. However, it does seem to draw higher quality traffic from my experience.
I have used offline methods such as flyers and these have worked well. One unusual but effective method I saw was a URL - along with a three line description to draw interest - drawn repeatedly in chalk on a busy sidewalk. Thousands of people would have seen that every day. It must have attracted quite a few hits before it was eroded away by all the people walking over it!
Matt Hayden´s last blog ..Update on page rank update!
Another good thing to keep in mind is blended search. Make sure your products, images, videos, etc. are optimized as they are shown directly in search results nowadays. Google Base is a good place to start to see if you have any content that can benefit from specialized results.
Jeff Swanson´s last blog ..Social shopping with ShopTogether