How to drive traffic to your website

The very first consideration when seeking how to drive traffic to your website is in deciding upon the URL and title of your website. The URL of any website is essentially its permanent address on the Internet and can never be changed so careful consideration of this factor is strongly advised. It is very likely that you will have only limited control over the URL for your website but this and the title should match one another as closely as possible and be extremely indicative as to the subject of the website.

It is often stated that content is King on the Internet. This refers simply to the fact that any website which is hoping to attract quality, relevant traffic has to include lots of unique, relevant content upon the subject around which it is constructed. This is in order that visitors to the website find the site useful, interesting, or both, and that the indexing search engine spiders are equally impressed.

The best way to ensure that you include sufficient content of this quality is to ask yourself the question of what you would be hoping to find and learn as a visitor to your site and ensure that your content fully meets all of these requirements.

It is imperative that when you have drafted the quality content which you intend including on your website that you check it very carefully for the frequency of words and phrases which may be considered key to your subject.  These are simply words and phrases which others are likely to input to the search engines when searching for sites relating to your subject. There is no specific formula for the frequency of these key words and phrases but most guidelines suggest that they should comprise between two and five percent of your website's content.

The final step in the initial construction of your website has to be the inclusion of relevant, outbound links to other sites around the Web which are very closely related to the subject of your own website. The search engines and human visitors alike love these links as they are useful to visitors seeking further information on the subject and eliminate the need for them to revisit the search engine page. These links should never be thought of as driving traffic away from your own site to those of your competitors but rather as providing both a valuable service to visitors and fodder for the search engine spiders alike. 

This stage may be considered the first literal step in how to drive traffic to your website. This is the point at which you start to let people know in a very practical sense both that your website exists and why they should take the time to pay it a visit. This is done in the first instance by building links to your site wherever you legitimately can in a relevant sense around the Web and encouraging people to click upon them.

The quickest and easiest way to drive traffic to your website in this respect is by submitting your site to some of the more popular social book-marking sites. These sites include Digg, Reddit, Delicious and StumbleUpon. How to drive traffic to your website will only be achieved to best effect in this way, however, if you are seen to be a valuable member of these communities. This means adding a lot of interesting and informative links to the site that are not of your creation. Simply submitting link after link to sites which you build or articles which you write is essentially a form of spamming (see tips and advice, above right) and is not conducive to success.

The remaining text in this section of how to drive traffic to your website very often depends on your having the knowledge of how to link from one Web location to another. It may be that the relevant site has dedicated tools for this purpose or it may be that you  are required to incorporate the link or links in to your text by using such as HTML or BBCode. Whichever the case may be, the problem remains as to how you can best encourage or even persuade people to click on your link and visit your website. The best way of doing this is simply by asking them to do so and this can be approached in two different ways:

1) Include in your text a phrase such as, "Click here for fantastic information on how to use Helium.com for research." The word "here" is simply hyper-linked to allow visitors to click through to your website. Remember, however, never to include misleading details in this practise and encourage people to click through to something other than what they expect to find.

2) Alternatively, it is possible to direct them to a very prominent link by including such as, "Click on the link below for some great reasons to write for Helium!"

The next step here is to include a hyper-link as below:

Reasons to Write for Helium    

Starting a blog on your subject and essentially using it as an online newspaper for your website is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. A blog is an incredibly easy resource to maintain and indeed depends upon regular posting to know any form of success. I always recommend Blogger as being the best blog hosting platform, particularly for those new to the concept. This is both for its ease of use and its facility for incorporating Google Adsense and affiliate product links.

Squidoo and Hub Pages are Web 2.0 sites which essentially allow you to build mini pages on the Web. Full instructions for using these sites are contained on the sites themselves which are linked to in the previous sentence. Essentially, however, it is a very effective way to drive traffic to your website by building high quality, informative pages on these sites on a very specific aspect of your wider subject and referring visitors to your main website for further information.

In a very similar fashion, sites such as Helium (upon which you are reading this guide) and Bukisa afford the opportunity to write articles upon the general subject of your website and allow you to link to your website in your biographical section on the sites.

Although there remains a stigma attached to social bookmarking sites in many people's eyes in a sense that they are but the domain of gossiping teenagers, these sites are incredibly powerful tools with which to drive traffic to your website. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and more are essentially about social interaction with other Web users around the world. As each of them has literally tens of millions of subscribers, examining how each of these very different sites work and determining how to utilise them to drive traffic to your website can pay extraordinary dividends. 

This step in how to drive traffic to your website will apply to each individual to very different extents, depending upon the subject of your website. What it involves is finding - via the search engines - forums and discussion boards which are relevant to the subject of your website. You should join these forums and discussion boards and regularly post and contribute to them valuable and informative information. This serves to build your reputation around the Web as someone who knows what they are talking about and essentially builds you a form of fanbase.

Try to find forums in this respect which allow a signature panel to be created and a link to be placed to your website in this panel. It is not good form to manually include a link to your site in every post that you make as this again can be interpreted as spamming. The idea is that as your following builds and grows, more and more people will click through to your website.

It is a very similar concept to Step 6 but worthy of its own mention to say that leaving comments on other people's blogs can prove an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. This is because very often it is possible to leave not only your name when making such a comment but allow your name to hyperlink to your website.

As in other situations, it is important to comment only on relevant blogs and in a positive, constructive fashion.

How to drive traffic to your website is not a one-off activity. It is a process which requires constant management and development in all of the above ways. It may very well take days, weeks, or even months to begin to realise the levels of traffic to your website that you desire but there are few legitimate shortcuts in this respect. Processes such as spamming may know significant results in the very short term but will do infinite damage in the longer term. Only by following the procedures outlined above and constantly being on the look-out for ways to tweak and enhance them to best effect will you achieve your long term objectives in respect of traffic to your website.

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