Traffic - The Life Blood Of Every Single Web Site

By Author: Steve Sharpe
Total Articles: 75
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So you have spent days building a killer website and you've published it to your webspace. You sit back and sip on your hard earned cup of tea and wait for the visitors to arrive at your site. But... guess what they don't come! What have I done wrong, you ask yourself.

Well, you've done nothing wrong, it what you haven't done that is the problem. Nobody knows you or your website exist. If you were selling a car or a computer you would put an advert in the local paper or use an online auction site, you need to go through a similar process with your website. You need to advertise!

Wow, that sounds expensive, I hear you say, but it doesn't have to be.

There are so many ways to advertise for free on the internet nowadays, that I'm surprised online advertising companies are still in business. In this article and the follow up articles I am going to show you how to get free advertising.

The first method of gaining visibility for your site, is not even advertising as such. You need to let the search engines know you have put a website up on the internet. In particular, you need to let Google know. Guess ...
... what, Google has made it really simple for you to achieve this. Forget about submitting your site to the search engine add URL page, for now anyway, although this should be something you do with some of the smaller ones as they can send you traffic but in lesser quantities.

Use Google's Webmaster Tools. Goto Google and type Webmaster Tools, open an account if you haven't got one already, and add a website to your profile. Next verify your site by uploading the html file to your website. Once verified, submit a sitemap. Googlebot will return regularly to verify the existence of your website and download your sitemap, so keep it updated. That's it, you are in the Google search engine. Although it may take sometime for Google to index your website for your chosen keywords, you have completed step 1.

Next up, create a blog. I would suggest you use a Wordpress blog and host it on your own webspace. You can download the files directly from Wordpress. Setup your blog and post to it every 2 to 3 days. Google loves blogs as the content is always being updated, and they will index your blog within the first week of existence. This is because Wordpress has a built in blog pinger, that pings the best blog directories to let them know you have updated your content. Google references these blog directories every single day.

In your blog, ensure you have active links to your website, as Googlebot will follow all the links in your blog once it finds it and ultimately jump across to your new web site.

Social Media is a subject area that can't be covered in a few paragraphs, but is without doubt the biggest thing to happen on the internet since its inception. Internet Marketers are well aware of its power and use it everyday in their marketing strateies.

One aspect of Social Media that you should use when launching a new website, is Social Bookmarking. Sites like Social Poster are an ideal way to kick off your social marketing plan. Sign up for each and everyone of the sites listed and create a bookmark for your new site. Once complete, look for other sites in your niche on each of these social bookmarking sites. Make friends with as many people as you can, as they will visit your profile and some will click through to your website. The more friends you have the more chances of getting clickthroughs.

OK these are just some ideas to generate traffic, other possibilities could be, Social Media sites, like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc... Traffic Exchanges, although these are losing their effectiveness due to spammy users, Forum Posting, Article submission are other ways of generating traffic. All of these methods create good quality backlinks to your site, so do it a lot and you will surely see a stampede of traffic before too long.