Attracting Traffic to Your Web site (Search Engine Optimization)

A web site without visitors is not accomplishing its purpose as a web site. Having your own web site is not all that is needed for you to start earning cash online; you must consciously drive traffic to your site if you want people to see it. Your website design may rock, your codes perfect but what really drives people to your site is the quality of information they can get from it. Driving traffic to your site is not an easy task especially if you consider the competition involve. There are many sites related to yours and all are competing for traffic. Your success would lie on knowing the working-strategies you can use to boost your traffic. We’re going to consider some of these strategies. Today, we’re going to look at one free method of traffic generation.

Traffic Generation #1: Submitting Articles to Article Directories
This is a sure way of driving traffic to your site. To begin, article directories are web sites that accept huge collection of articles written by people like you and me. You can write several articles and submit them to hundreds of article directories. These directories provide articles that anyone can use. One good thing about advertising in article directories is that you already know that the visitors are interested in the information you are presenting. This is because in article directories, people search through categories and subcategories to get the information they want. This means that if somebody clicks on a category, say computers, then the person really wants information on computers. This is called targeted-traffic generation and it greatly increases your chance of success. Because this method is free, some people tend to ignore it. If that’s you, better think twice! Many web surfers like using article directories because of the quality information they can get from it. So don’t ignore it.

If you submit articles to article directories, the benefits you get are free exposure and free traffic to your web site(s). To get these benefits, you have to put a resource box at the end of every article you submit. The resource box is where you fill in your name, contact information, information about your site and a link that points to your web site (to get a feel of how resource box looks like, visit the article directories listed in this post. But generally, the information in your resource box should be short and clear). The page where this link would land the visitor can also be an opt-in page (where people can subscribe to your email newsletters). In this opt-in page, you’d try to convince the visitor to subscribe to your newsletters if they want more quality information from you. You can also tell them of the bonuses they would get if they subscribe. The bonuses may be free ebooks or software. One place to get bonuses for free is at freeware sites. In these sites, you’ll get tons of ebooks and software that give you the right to give them away freely. You can download a few ebooks or software that supplements your site’s content and use them as bonuses for your subscribers (Note: Make sure that anything you download in freeware sites is virus-free or you’ll irritate your visitors. Scan every download with a powerful antivirus).

Capturing your visitors’ email addresses is a great online marketing strategy that has made many rich, so don’t ignore it! When you capture their email addresses, you can use it to educate and enlighten them on your products and services. Through email messages, you tell your visitors how your products and services can help them and why they should buy. The importance of capturing email addresses of potential customers cannot be overemphasized. You use it to build credibility. Most sales online are not made the first time a visitor comes to your site, it may require up to seven visits. Some interested visitors can even visit your site, love what they see and then forget it the next day. So by capturing their email addresses, you remind them why they visited in the first place and through newsletters, you can convince them to buy.

In order to reach the widest possible audience, your articles should be sprinkled with popular keywords. These are keywords with high search volume. There is a way to know the popularity of any keyword you choose using tools provided by search engines, but we shall not go into it here, check out subsequent posts for details. Now let’s see how using popular keywords can help you get traffic to your site: Since the keywords you used in your article are very popular, thousands and even millions of people would be searching for them and when they do, it is very likely that those directories you have your articles submitted to would be listed in the search result. If the directories have high search engine ranking, the page containing your article and other similar articles would rank high in the search result. This increases the tendency of your article being read and if this happens and the visitors like your article, they might seek for further information by following the link in your resource box.

In a situation where you don’t have the time to write the articles yourself, you can pay other people to do it for you. All you have to do is to get the keywords and find people who will write the articles base on those keywords. You may give it to a friend or you take it online. There are many web sites that have employers who can do this for you; two good examples are GetAFreelancer (www.getafreelancer.com) and Constant-Content (www.constant-content.com).

It is good to submit your articles to directories with high search engine ranking so that your article would rank high in any search result containing your keywords. Examples of article directories with high search engine ranking are:

http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.articlepros.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.submityourarticle.com
http://www.goarticles.com

The kind of articles you submit should not look as if you are advertising. You should provide valuable information because that is what would determine whether your visitors would follow you to your site or not. Try to submit at least, one article every week to article directories.

Submitting articles to directories can take some time. Some sites would require that you create an account with them. Creating an account involves filling in your email address, a password you want to use and some other personal information. After that, you need to go back to your inbox and open the message they sent, follow the instruction given to activate your account. Whenever you want to submit an article, you log in with your username and password. To avoid your article from being rejected, make sure you read their submission guideline and also take a look at already published articles to get a feel of what they need.

I hope you enjoy reading through this post, see you next time for yet another way to boost your site traffic.