How To Increase Site Traffic

This is an article I recently wrote on how to increase your site traffic or unique hits, which is based on my perspective and experience:

There are many ways to generate incoming traffic to your website. These methods will vary from one webmaster to another, depending on their level of understanding and capacity to showcase their site. A lot of webmasters may think that the only way to increase unique hits to their website is with money alone, which is unfortunately a wrong assumption. Based on my understanding of how this system works, I will share my experiences on web promotion and essential ways to increase hits on your website.

The first step you should take into consideration is, without a doubt, submitting your site to multiple search engines. This will help for search engine robots to automatically index your website within the first few days prior to your submission. Submission to popular search engines is a must because, as a webmaster, you should know that the average person will perform searches through commonly used engines. These include services such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Bing, and much more. Even though this method is the most simple, you'd be surprized what the results would bring in the long run. Keep in mind that search engines are not the only way to go when it comes to the overall site submission process. Web directories are secondary aspects to submitting websites, as sites tend to fall under particular categories that help visitors narrow their searches down to.

The next step revolves around the use of relevant information that is showcased on your site. This may include all types of content that is displayed on your site from text, images, videos, and other files. Your design and uniqueness plays a big role when it comes to incoming visitors, especially the newcomers to your website. First impressions are usually important, as it may or may not convince the visitor to return to your site in the future. For example, a visitor bookmarking the page is obviously a good sign of your site's growth. Even if the content your site provides may be similar to others on the net, try you best to keep your ideas original and up-to-date.

If you've done your research online about ways to increase traffic to your site, you probably are aware of traffic exchange programs. I wouldn't recommend going forth with this idea unless you know the service you have signed up with actually does what it says. Many of these services will turn out to be scams with no gurantees whatsoever and are most likely small organizations that are trying to rip you off. In fact, I have heard that there are sites that have bots or software that change IPs everytime they enter sites, which makes webmasters think they are actually getting new visitors. In reality, they are being fooled by these automated bots.

Look closely at the HTML throughout the pages of your website. Is there anything in particular inside those tags? Inserting META tags inside this portion of your code will prove to be helpful in terms of pointing our your content to online search engines. It'll also direct visitors to getting your site if their keywords accurately match among them. However, I have heard that placing too many keywords inside the META tags is not a wise thing to do. The best way to go about doing this is limiting those keywords according to what is provided on your site. In other words, throwing random words here and there is only going to push your site back a few pages when search engines display results to visitors.

If you've formed affiliations with other websites that offer similar content to yours, that can also play a significant role in increasing hits. This brings up the idea of advertising for other companies in exchange for traffic, which I mentioned previously. Ask yourself the following question: What is the likelihood my visitors will come back to my site from the build-up of more and more ads? This is referring to the webmasters that are often driven to desperately consider in placing massive amounts of banner or pop-up ads on their site to either increase their unique hits or revenue. I'd rather prefer sticking with only displaying the content that I offer instead of advertisement everywhere, because I, myself, have found this to be annoying when coming across these type of things while surfing through websites. In the end, however, it is the webmaster's choice whether or not they wish to go through with this. If you do choose to place ads on your site, I recommend customizing those ads so that they are relevant to what your site offers. This way, there is a good chance that some of your audience will be kept interested.

In conclusion, all of these things shall come together in playing their parts to increasing hits for your site. Besides following these basic guidelines, the only thing that is left to do is to "update & wait". As time progresses, your hard work and addition of content on your site will give you the results you wish to see. If these techniques are used the right way, you will see results starting almost immediately. But in most cases, you will gradually see an increasing in visitors monthly.