How to Successfully Market Your Website: How Do I Get Traffic To My Site?

How Do I Get Traffic To My Site?

Many people think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. Wrong answer. Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight. Think about it this way - how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don't tell them? You must advertise. Here are some proven ways to advertise your site without spending [much] money:

Submit your site to as many search engines as you can. Here are some of the popular ones you can start with:

Alexa AltaVista AllTheWeb AOL Ask

DMOZ ExactSeek Excite GigaBlast Google

What-U-Seek Kanoodle Live Lycos LookSmart

MSN National Directory Yahoo Bing WebCrawler
Use a favicon.ico - see below.
If you have a Christian Website, be sure to submit it to all the Christian Directories. We have a list of about 50 of the most popular Christian Directories here. (sadly the list gets shorter by the month)
Have Dynamic content on your site - Message Board, Links Directory, Guest Book, Online Search, Picture Gallery, Quote of the day, News items, Site Search, Links Engine ... It all makes for a more enjoyable experience for your visitors ... and interested visitors come back.
Make sure you don't have broken links on your site! There is nothing more annoying when one clicks a link and it does not work. There are hundreds of places you can go on the internet that will check your link validity. Use them.
Make sure your META TAGS are done right. Learn how to do this here.
Submit your site to as many privately run Link Directories/Search Engines as you can find. These will not generally boost your traffic in any major way but will help to maintain steady stream of qualified visitors.
Use Banners with care. See below.
Subscribe to the Usenet groups and advertise there. A good place to start is Google Groups
- Be sure to submit your site in appropriate groups!
- Be sure to signup with a backup email or you will get onto every spammers database!
- Be sure you don't SPAM -- only submit a write up of your site once to any given group.
Use social networking sites like Twitter, facebook, YouTube, Plaxo, Linkedin and others to get the word out.