With countless new websites created every day in this highly competitive internet world, the importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be overemphasized. With the never-ending streams of new internet users coming on board, it presents competition either directly or indirectly but more importantly, at the same time, it also presents fresh new traffic.
With this in mind, routing traffic from the web to your website could very well be the only way to keep your website and your e-commerce alive. To rank high in the search engine results is really challenging but not impossible. There are numerous direct and indirect ways, some costly yet others fairly affordable means of getting a better ranking.
In the stocks market, retail investors are unlikely to take on the big boys in the financial markets, these larger institutions move the markets. Retail investors start small and play small. Likewise, retail 'netvestors', like you and I, have to know our places before taking the big bite. Fortunately, out there in the marketplace, there exists a repertoire of website promotion strategies that we can use to drive traffic to your website.
Examples of these strategies include using paid advertising, if you are quite hefty, to affiliate marketing, if you have no products/services of your own. Most of these strategies involve some form of payment upfront. This is true if you are considering outsourcing to someone else to help you drive traffic to your website. Hello? There is no free lunch in the cyberworld too. Do not give up hope as yet if you are really tight-strap and could not afford to pay beyond your purchase of domain names and web hosting plans.
There are indeed ways to promote your website and to increase web traffic without losing a single dime. But, the only condition is that you have to be willing to invest time and effort. To me, article writing is the best, but not necessary the most effective, website promotion strategy you can consider. I can read what is on your mind. You are now asking how writing articles can help improve your site's web traffic. Allow me to show you three different ways in this article.
Way #1 Reach Out To More People
Think about it. If you have written good articles, wouldn't it be a waste not to share them with others? You can post your articles in your own website or you can submit them to article directories such as at EzineArticles, GoArticles and at other online publishers.
Firstly, you should be thankful that such article directories exist, otherwise it will be even more challenging to publicize your articles with little or no money down. Submitting your articles not only gives you exposure but an opportunity to promote your website thus potentially getting free traffic to visit your site.
By including a link back to your website or have your URL in the author's signature resource box, you get exposure and advertising at no cost. Submitting your articles to the leading and major article directories allows you to take advantage of their popularity. Your published articles had undergone stringent review processes at these directories. Therefore, your articles are bound to be relevant to some sites that may also link back to you, hence the term, 'backlinks'. Search engines love one-way backlinks and these will increase your link popularity and help improve website ranking. Knowingly and unknowingly, increasing your link popularity is one of the most important strategies you can have in this highly competitive internet market world.
By doing good to the internet world through your quality articles, people surfing the Net for information online will gain to benefit from you. You also benefit from more exposure and thus higher web traffic.
Way #2 Free Advertising
No one likes spams in their emails. Similarly, your good articles should remain informative and relevant without any form of marketing language for your readers. By being able to submit your articles to major article directories presents an opportunity to advertise, for free, your website. So, how do I promote my website then? In exchange for your good articles, the directories allow you include your site's URL link in the resource box. Not only that, it gives you the opportunity to market your internet business. However, you must not get carried away with what you write in the resource box.
Free advertising aside, with your articles that are helpful to readers, you leave upon them a good impression of yourself and your website. Readers who are interested to find out more from or about you are likely to visit your website and if you are in the internet business, may even make a purchase of your product/service. This term is known as a click through.
Everyone appreciates good quality content in any article, which is far better than a few lines of advertisement space. In your article, depending on its relevancy, you already have the opportunity to pre-sell your product/service to your readers, who may eventually become your potential customers.
Way #3 Optimize Search Engine Ranking
To set up your new website, you need to perform a research on what domain name to use as your URL and if it is still available. There are many reliable and good domain registering sites that provide means of checking the availability of your chosen domain name. One- or two-word domain names are a rarity. You may still stand a chance if you add prefixes or suffixes behind your main domain name.
Assuming that you have hosted your website, post your article in a new page in your website. Optimize it to make your webpage (or website) search-engine friendly. This is done easily by using top-ranked keywords or key phrases in your articles as well as in meta tags, which are like source codes that form your webpage/website. These tags are invisible on the webpage but are essential elements that give your website a high search engine ranking.
Once you have uploaded your new webpage to your webhost server, do your site a favour by pinging it to the internet. Search engine crawlers will slowly spider through it and pick up new content which can help you gain an increase in search engine ranking. It is an effective way to gain a high ranking in search results. You already know what high ranking status will do to boost your business.
You now have at least three different ways of writing articles that can help boost your internet business. If for one reason or another you are unable to apply all of them, you can consider starting with just one of your choice and start building confidence doing it repeatedly a number of times before adding on the rest.
As you can see, arming yourself with the knowledge that can help boost your internet business will only do good for you.
Lawrence M Thompson is an author who owns several internet businesses and he sees the joy in sharing his years of experience in this field with those who are open to learning and want to achieve success faster with efficiency.
