For the full blog post visit:
http://www.jasonnazar.com/2009/01/14/the-7-ways-to-get-traffic-on-the-web/
The 7 Ways to Get Traffic on the Web
“If You Build It…They Will Come” may work for historical baseball ghosts, but it’s not a strategy you can rely on when starting an internet company. Driving traffic to your website is a formula that can be reverse engineered. Other than paying for traffic with advertising, there are only so many ways to get people to show up at your door.
There are 7 Ways to Get (unpaid) Traffic on the Web, in no weighted order they are: 1.) Search Engines 2.) Referring Traffic / Press 3.) Social Media 4.) Online Partnerships / Distribution Deals 5.) Refreshing Content 6.) The Viral Loop / User Email 7.) Solve a Personal Compelling Need
Search Engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK redirect billions of searches everyday. Search engines have the potential to drive millions of visitors to a given site. Wikipedia and About are two of the most popular sites on the web, but the majority of their traffic comes from referrals from search engines, not people going directly to their site. To make sure your site is optimized for search engine traffic: 1.) Each individual piece of content should have its own distinct URL(title tag), and a unique title (H1 tag) for the page that search engines can read and index. 2.) Increase the production of your content. It’s a simple formula, go to Google and type in this query site:“name of your site.com”. The more pages indexed, the more traffic you will get.
3.) Get more websites linking to your various content pages. Once you get your pages indexed by search engines, you want them to show up as high as possible in the results. The two most important variables to make sure an individual piece of content ranks high in search results are 1)how many inbound links that page has from other websites and 2)the amount of traffic that page gets. Helpful Resources about Search Engine Traffic: 68 Helpful SEO Tools
“Referring Traffic / Press - The web is interconnected, and traffic flows among sites that interlink. The more sites that link to you, the more sustainable traffic you build overtime. The type of sites that might link into you are blogs, traditional press online, forums or bulleting boards, or content rich sites that are focused on a similar topic. To make sure you maximize the potential for referring traffic: 1.) Create a target list of blogs that could cover your product or content. You can search Technorati to find the most popular blogs on the web across various categories. Make sure to reach out to bloggers personally and build a relationship. Leave comments on their posts, link to them from your site… do that and when you approach them to write about you, you’ll find a welcomed reception. 2.) Make a list of 15 similar websites. Track all their online press in major publications such as the WSJ, NYTs, BusinessWeek Online, or more specific trade publications. Make a list of the journalists writing the articles, they’re easy to find on Linkedin and Facebook. Follow up with compliments on their writing and get some emails going back and forth, and then pitch your product or service. Helpful Resources about for Getting Referral Traffic: Top Blogs List (with email contacts)
To read about the other 5 ways visit:
http://www.jasonnazar.com/2009/01/14/the-7-ways-to-get-traffic-on-the-web/