Increased Online Traffic

You have taken time to carefully design your website to encourage visitors to stay and take action.  Great!  Now you should be looking for increased online traffic.

A website will not be very useful if no one comes to it.   The key now is to get traffic to your site.  Let's look at some ways you can increase your online traffic.

Link exchanges

Although Google may not put as much weight on a reciprocal link exchange (one where you link to a site and they link back to your site) as they used to, it is believed that link exchanges are still beneficial.   I would suggest exchanging links with sites that are relevant to the topic of your site.

Link Directories

Go to Google and put in the topic of your site plus directories.  For example, if your site is about homeschooling, type into Google," homeschooling + directories" (without the quotes).  See if you can submit your site to the directory.  Many times, you will be able to without linking back, so this is especially good, as it gives you one-way links, which are believed to be better than reciprocal links.

Basic SEO

A good practice leading to increased online traffic is by doing some basic search engine optimization (seo).  SEO scares many people.  However, there are some simple things you can do on your site to make it clearer to the search engines what your site is all about. (see articles on seo, part 1 and 2)

Pay Per Click Advertising

You can do some pay per click advertising, such as Google Adwords.  You would use your keywords in the ad and try to draw traffic to your site as they click on your ad.

IMPORTANT: Please be aware that you pay every time someone clicks on your ad, so be sure to set a limit as to how much you want to spend daily on the ads.  After you reach the limit, your ad will be removed for the rest of that day.

Forums

Visit forums that are related to your niche and post messages with a link to your website in your signature.  Make sure your posts are informative and well written, as this is the first impression the forum participants will have of you.

Blogs

Visit blogs in your niche, and leave comments on them.  This is the same idea as the forums.  You will usually be able to have a link to your website included in the comment.

Freebies

You can write viral reports, which are reports you can give away for free, and encourage other website owners to distribute them also for you.  This way, it gives them something good to give away to their visitors, and it benefits you because you will include a link back to your website in the report.

Contests

Hold a contest and submit your site to contest promotion sites (check Google for some specific sites).  This should bring in increased traffic to your site.

If you follow some of these practices consistently, you should see  increased online traffic.  Of course, there are still many other ways to increase traffic to your site, such as blogging and article writing.