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Ten Steps To Grow Website Traffic

by: Brian Pratt

If you own your own website or have a page supplied by a program, growing website traffic will be one of the keys to your success. You need a growing, self-generating stream of website traffic and plenty of it. Preferably free and preferably preconditioned to buy your product of service.

This article provides some ideas for growing website traffic.

(1) Directories
Directories are website listings. The trick is to find a directory which receives huge volumes of website traffic. Start by applying for listings in Yahoo, DMOZ and Looksmart. These are huge portals with significant website traffic. Getting listed isn�t easy but once achieved you will see a significant lift in your website traffic. Look at other directories but make sure they have a good traffic rating (use Alexa).

(2) Traffic Exchanges
Every website you view in a traffic exchange generates credits which are exchanged for views of your site. This website traffic is free and can be generated almost instantly. The more sites you view the more people visit your website and the more your website traffic grows.

(3) Article Writing
One of the most effective methods of generating website traffic. Best of all its free. Magazines, Ezines and Webmasters are always looking for fresh content. Just write an article on any topic which interests you, optimize it for keywords and be sure to include your website URL in the bio line at the bottom of the article. Then submit it to ezine directories on the web. This will generate website traffic and create backlinks to your site, which in turn helps with search engine rankings.

(4) Search Engine Optimization
Making sure your website is search engine friendly will certainly help grow your website traffic. Ensure all the meta and alt tags are completed, optimize the text for your chosen keywords, ensure there is an H1 header, update your robots.txt, update your google sitemap and ensure google is alerted each time you make a change. There are a number of sites which provide a �spider simulation� which shows you what your site looks like to a spider and what you can do to improve its search engine ranking.

(4) Blogs
Ensure your blog is located on your site, that it links to your key pages and that you ping each time your blog is updated. A regularly updated blog will attract readers which in turn builds website traffic.

(5) Forums
Leaving your URL in forums will generate website traffic in two ways. First, people who read your post are likely to click the link to checkout your site. Secondly search engines will generally accept the link a counting towards your link popularity.

(6) Viral Advertising
If you have a message and you tell 10 people and they each tell 10 people and so on, by the time the message goes through 10 levels it has been passed on to a million people.

A similar principle can be used in marketing. If you produced a free report or ebook filled with links back to your site and gave it away, the chances are those you gave it away to would do the same thing. Your links would be spread all over the Internet and your website traffic will grow.

There are also couple of viral websites which successfully use the same principle to grow website traffic. Follow the link in the resource box below to see some examples.

(7) Reciprocal Links
By swapping links, webmasters hope that people will click on their link in other websites thereby generating website traffic. This strategy is one of the very best ways of generating free, targeted website traffic and should be high on your list of priorities. It also is highly rated by search engines

(8) Classifies Ads
Do a search for �classified ads� and you will find many sites, which accept classified advertisements. Make sure you place your ad in a site complimentary to your product. Generally sites at the top of google/yahoo searches will perform better than those lower down. Again make sure the site you are placing your ad on has a high traffic rating or it will not assist with your website traffic.

(9) Pay Per Click Advertising
Programs like Google's Adwords will deliver pre-qualified targeted website traffic to your site. I have found this to be an excellent way of delivering high converting website traffic.

(10) Expired Domain Names
Some expired domain names are still receiving traffic. If you are lucky you can pick one up quite cheaply. These can provide a very cheap source of long-term website traffic.

The greater your website traffic the closer you will come to your goals. I hope this article will help you grow your website traffic and reach those goals.

To your success!

About the author:
Brian Pratt is a 47 year old New Zealander with over 10 years internet experience. He owns and operates a Plug-In Profit site at Brian can be contacted at brian@bestrealincome.com

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