To state the obvious, the internet is a big place. Over the course of its lifetime, it has become much more accessible, not just for browsing but also for doing business with your own website. The tools are now out there to allow even those with no prior experience to put together a professional looking site, and for those who have even a modest budget to invest in the project, it is easy to generate a decent return on your investment.
The key to any successful website lies in getting people to go there. Once they are there, as long as you are offering something useful and have designed your website well, it ideally won’t be hard to convince them to stay, or to keep coming back.
But finding effective ways of increasing traffic to your website is one of the hardest aspects of the whole venture to get right. Conversely, it is very easy to get it wrong.
Blogs
Blogs are a brilliant way of encouraging more traffic to your website. Inviting guest writers to blog on your site will allow you to host a broader range of content than you are capable of producing all on your own. It also provides you with an excellent space for advertising; many companies will pay good money to have a guest blog about their product hosted on your website.
Of course, the value of a spot on your site will be proportional to the amount of traffic that you generate and so, while blogs are a great way of generating traffic, you have to accept that to begin with they are not going to be of much value. Allow a few early adopters some heavy discounts, or even a complimentary posting spot or two and you can foster a long-lasting relationship.
Link building
Link building is a service which is available from a number of different providers. The Click Intelligence link building service has a great reputation amongst these. Link building is a key component of search engine optimization (SEO), which as the name suggests refers to a number of techniques which are used to raise a page’s visibility in search engine results.
Link building involves increasing the number of other websites that link to yours, thus increasing your SEO score, using a number of different methods. With a reputable link building service, these methods will all be ‘white-hat’ meaning that companies like Google approve of them as an organic way of increasing traffic.
Internal links
Many people don’t realize it but internal links, which go from one page on your site to another, are also valuable in terms of SEO and raising your visibility. Always look for opportunities to link internally, if you are hosting a blog, this will provide you with innumerable opportunities to maximize on the investment.
As traffic to your website increases, you will begin to receive more direct feedback from visitors as well as having access to more detailed information through various monitoring tools which can help you to establish what is an isn’t working. Listen to feedback, deliver the best website that you can, and everything else will fall into place on its own.