A considerable amount of Internet marketers spend large proportion of their time building their sites, but very little time attracting visitors. Two general strategies exist for driving traffic to your site, organic traffic (through Search Engine Optimisation or SEO) and pay-per-click. For starters, we’ll focus on driving traffic to your site through several stategies.

1. Write quality content

The number one rule for building traffic and visitors is by writing quality, unique content related to your niche. The search engines, including Google, love unique content and will reward you with top rankings. Along with the unique content make sure you optimize associated article titles, meta descriptions, H1 HTML tags and keywords. Many people however don’t have the time to write articles – in this case there are many people that offer article or content writing services -I would recommend starting with the Digital Point forums, specifically this forum. A word of warning though, there are many “fly-by-nights” so do your research and ensure the user has a good iTrader rating. Duplicate or non-unique content is disliked by the search engines and could decrease your PR or even worse the search engines (particularly Google) could de-index or sandbox your site, meaning that search engines effectively don’t even know your sites exist. Copyscape provides a limited, free service which enables you to ascertain the “uniqueness” of your content.

2. Build links

Arguably right up there with your unique content is your “link juice”. Google’s ranking algorithm, the set of rules which determine your position within search results, factors in the amount of links pointing to your site. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm factors in the quality of those sites that are linking to you. The PageRank (PR) ranging from a zero to a ten, determines how “important” Google thinks your site is, zero being not very important and 10 being the most important. For people with more money than time, there are people that offer link building services. Most offer social bookmarking links and directory submission services. In addition, one of the more expensive options is buying high PR links from blogs or site. In terms of value for money, the social bookmarking services is generally the best option to go with first, following by the directory submissions. Generally, the higher PR links are not worth it for starters, but may be considered further down the road.

3. Give it time and maintain the link and article building

Organic or natural traffic takes time, anywhere between a month to three months to gain some decent traffic. During this time it’s wise to continue to build links and write quality content. With regards to both content and link building, try to build then “naturally” – in other words, don’t build hundreds of links or create a mammoth amount of content at one time – search engines of frown upon this and your ranking may suffer. As your PR increases, so will your rankings and therefore traffic.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

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