How do I increase traffic

So now you have your website made, but business is slow. You are probably wondering, how do I get people to come to my site? I am only getting like 10 hits per day. It doesn’t happen overnight, you have to give the internet a chance to find you.

There are many different ways to increase traffic. You can start by visiting similar sites in your niche and asking the webmaster if they want to do a link exchange. Link exchanges are usually free, and most average Joe webmasters don’t mind. You then need many more sites linking to you. You could reply to comments on other web sites, or find some sites that allow you to add your own URL to their list. By replying to comments, not only are you going to get some traffic off of it, but you are creating what is called a back link. Back links can help you get page rank on Google, but that is a different subject.

You have tried to get some webmasters to link to you, and submitted your site to some free link pages. I would suggest trying to find some top list sites. It really depends on your niche. I would Google up something like “cooking top100″ or “cooking top list”. Top list sites are just a list of banners numbered 1-whatever. The more hits through them, the farther up the page your banner goes. If your topic is popular, then you could see some decent hits from a good top list site.

Well what else can I do? You could spam/promote your site on forums. I would suggest registering to a forum, again similar in topic. Look at the member count, members online, and the amount of topic/posts. If the forum looks active, then I suggest staying around. I would try to find the most popular forum on your topic to ensure the maximum amount of people see it. Create a signature (sig), which is basically a banner promoting your site. Every time you post on the forum, the sig will be displayed at the bottom of your post. Try to be active on the forum and get your post count up. When you gain more respect on forums, more people are apt to check out links in your sig because they develop a trust.

Pay per post services. You may have heard of Pay Per Post, or services similar, where you can either write a post and sell it to someone wanting to use it, or buy one to use on your own site as your own content. If you want to make out better on these services, create a back link to your site in the post. This is kind of evil, and you may want to check the rules for the service first and ensure that it is ok. This is why it is evil. For one, somebody else is going to pay you for the post you wrote. Two, that post has a back link, or two, to your website. I would have it say something like, “According to Shudogg.com, gas prices have gone up. Check out the full story.”

Now that is just an example, the second link doesn’t exist. Mouse over and you see that the text “Shudogg.com” links to my homepage. The text, “Check out the full story”, is a deep link. A deep link helps Google keep a good index of pages you definitely want seen.

Posting often, consistent, and quality content will bring readers back. If I go to a website, then go back again a week later, I will quickly close the page if nothing has changed. You want the readers to see a change every time they visit. A website that has good content, will get linked by other web masters.

Well, what are you waiting for? Start putting some of these practices to good use. Don’t worry about getting thousands of sites to link to you overnight.