How do I generate website traffic
1. Create valuable content
When I build websites for people I can figure that if they have an interest in the subject, chances are good other people will to. No matter what it is you are interested in there is a site on the net about it. When I want to know something I turn to the internet. My high school son has to research things on a daily basis, while he loves to read books, most of the research is done and credited to websites. We have a very valuable tool at our fingertips. So with this in mind the very first thing that you need to concentrate on to get people to your site is to have good content. Notice I said people. You don’t want nameless traffic that sees your site for 20 seconds and moves on. You want people who come to your site and stay until they have seen ever little bit. I love it when I get comments like I came to your site and stayed for 5 hours. Or I had 3 people tell me that your site was the best place to come. Remember that the purpose of content is to provide value to others. Word of mouth is the key, so you have to give them something to talk about.
2. Create original content.
All to often I find people who want a site just like so in so. They want the graphics, the text, and the success. It’s hard to compete with an original content site. Search engines are pretty good about finding the original to promote. Nothing is worse than finding the same article on 5 different sites. If you don’t feel passionate enough to find your own way, why should anyone seek you out. Be original!
3. Write for human beings first, computers second
You will find hundreds of ideas about how long a post should be, what it should include, what the keyword density should be. etc I tend to ignore this because my audience is real and alive. While algorthyms may change each month, people are still people and that is who accounts for the real traffic of a website. Of course you want to be high in the search engines, but think about what happens when google dumps all the well ranked sites. People all over the world get upset and start complaining that google is destroying their business. I believe in many eggs in many baskets. I figure that if a site is well ranked in the search engines and the search engines account for 20 percent of their traffic, then this is a healthy site. It means there are more people linking to a site because they want to refer to it. I have been dumped off the front page of google many times and it has never had a staggering affect on my sites traffic because the majority were coming in from other websites. Write for the people and they will come.
4. Make it easy for people to link to you.
Offer link exchange programs or give them the code to link to you. Set up accounts at places like Digg, Delicious, Netscape, Stumbleupon, Yahoo MyWeb, Reddit, Furl, Newsvine, Lookmarks, Blinklist, RealEstateVoices Network with other people!