As consumer activities rapidly increase, web traffic is the number one concern for any online business to survive. You may have the best website, product or service, but you will still need traffic for your business to make money online.

Below is a list of 51 web traffic tips I have compiled for you to start generating traffic to your website.

Keywords

1. Research and focus on writing posts with keywords related to your niche so that people are likely to find your site through search engines

2. Include these keywords in your tags

3. Use keywords to name your image files before uploading them

4. As far as possible, include keywords into your domain name URL

5. Get a domain name that’s easy to remember (and buy other similar domain names)

6. Include keywords to your online profiles in social networking sites

Content

7. Create a lively blog

8. Deliver high quality and unique content on your website so that people would want to tell their friends and come back often

9. Keep your content fresh, relevant and useful

10. Write informative reviews of products and ebooks

11. Add “Sticky Content” such as a online software or useful resources people will keep coming back to use

SEO

12. Implement SEO strategies to drive organic traffic to your site

13. Create one-way back links to your website

14. Make your website search-engine friendly with on-site optimization techniques

15. Install the All in One SEO Pack WP Plug-in on your blog

16. Keep a blog to supplement your main site (if your main site isn’t a blog) as blogs are built to attract search engine spiders

17. Make your website accessible for all browsers (which may include mobile browsers)

Marketing

18. Write and submit useful articles on topics related to your website to article submission sites

19. Syndicate your content – Create a RSS feed and include a link on your site

20. Build a brand – Visitors would want to associate themselves with a brand that is of value to them

21. Do informative pod casts

22. Publish a lively and useful newsletter readers can subscribe to and submit them to newsletter directories

23. Create lenses at Squidoo or hubs at Hubpages on related topics to your website and link to your website from them

Community

24. Participate and contribute useful content to forums related to your niche

25. Set up a forum to complement your main site and encourage participation

26. Guest blog on other sites related to your niche

27. Encourage guest blogging on your site

28. Contribute useful comments to blogs

29. Engage in social networking and social bookmarking

30. Make it easy for visitors to bookmark or tag your blog

31. Upload and tag photos to photo sharing communities like Flickr

32. Submit your site for directory listing to main directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ.org

33. Makes useful contributions to email discussion lists

34. Contribute to Yahoo! Answers and refer visitors to your site

35. Add a catchy signature to the bottom of every email sent

36. Add a catchy signature to your profile in forums

37. Request to be a moderator to forums relating to your niche

38. Join business associations and clubs related to your niche

Viral

39. Create something of value for people to pass around (e.g. eBook, reports, etc.)

40. If you are selling a product or service, set up an affiliate program so people can sell your products for you

41. Be creative – do something funny and target traffic to your site

42. Create and run contests to induce interests

Analysis

43. Analyze and monitor activities on your website with Google Analytics

44. Through the analytics, find out what keywords and websites generate most traffic to your site and focus your attention there

Advertising and Publicity

45. Get free publicity and try advertising in offline media (http://www.magazine.org/content/Files/OnlineMedia.pdf)

46. Advertise on free classified ad sites

47. Write keyword-rich press releases

48. Position yourself as a personality or expert, or both

49. Get mentioned in newspapers and websites

50. Request to be a columnist on popular niche sites relating to your niche

Fads

51. Stay abreast and chase new happenings, fads and hot topics

Web traffic generation is not a secret but more like an art that needs to be practiced. There is no easy way out as far as web traffic generation is concerned and all the tips listed above still requires a reasonable amount of investment in time, effort, resources and patience. Not all the tips listed above will be relevant to you. Test, analyze and test again to determine which are the methods that best suit your site, niche and expertise to get the best results.

SEO in its most basic form is a series of steps taken to make a web site search engine friendly and have it show up in the search engines. At a more advanced level, SEO can be implemented to allow the web site in question to rank high in the search engines, preferably in the first few positions.

The reason why it is desirable for a web site to rank high in the search engines is so that it will receive free organic traffic from the search engines. Such traffic is highly relevant and valuable because people who arrive from search engines are already interested in whatever they are searching for and highly likely to check the site out.

Obviously such visitors are also likely to convert to long term visitors if the web site offers good content or become customers if the web site offers a desirable product or service.

If you own a web site, it is definitely worthwhile looking into SEO for your site.

Web searches are the dominant form of finding information nowadays. The primary goal of the search engines is to bring relevant search results to users. When a user types in a search phrase, a search engine will deliver the most relevant information the user is searching for and that is why, visitors from search engines are almost always relevant visitors.

Through personal experience, I can tell you that web sites gain the highest amount of traffic through search engines if you implement search engine optimization correctly. From the statistics on all my sites, the search engines are responsible for driving 60% to 70% of all traffic to my sites!

Nobody knows for sure however how search engines rank web pages except for the search engine companies head honcho and programmers. However, it is fair to deduce that each search engine has its own unique algorithm for ranking web sites; otherwise all search engines will be showing more or less the same results.

Most experts have observed and agreed that there are some fundamentals in SEO which will affect how search engines rank a web page –

-          Whether key words are used within the URL of the page

-          Whether key words are used within the title of the page

-          Whether key words are used within the meta text description

-          Whether key words are used within the content of the page

-          Whether key words are using the <H2> tag

-          How many internal links (links from within the same site) point to the page

-          How many external links (links from outside the site) point to the page (to many experts and myself, this is the single most important element)

-          Whether the external pages linking to the page are relevant in subject matter

-          Whether key words used to link to the page are relevant

-          Whether the images used within the page have alternate text that includes the key words

The list goes on, but the above covers some of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.

Remember, ultimately a search engine’s goal is to return relevant information to its visitors. As such, search engines have become very intelligent at figuring out whether or not content is relevant to the search term. If you focus on providing good content on your website, you are on to a good start as far as SEO is concerned.

I would strongly recommend anybody serious in running a web site to invest time into learning search engine optimization or at least look for somebody to help you with SEO. This investment will bring you many times returns when you enjoy the traffic that comes with well implemented search engine optimization strategies.

SEO Products I Recommend

If you would like to bring your SEO to the next level and start ranking for keywords related to your niche, I would recommend that you check SEOLinkVine and 1WayLinks out. Both of them provide an easy solution for you to get back links to your site. All you have to do is to submit articles to these networks and you will be having a generous number of one way external links pointing to your site with your designated keywords.

As I’ve mentioned , having lots of external links is probably the single most important element to good SEO, so the above 2 services are absolute gold to me. I will leave you to check out their sales pages. I’ve personally seen several of my sites shoot up for their keywords in a matter of weeks thanks to SEOLinkVine and 1WayLinks.

If you can spare the cash, sign up for both (who complains about more links right?)

If you only have $47 to spare, I suggest you sign up for 1WayLinks first because it only costs $7 the first month (subsequent months at $47) and it is a more established network as compared to SEOLinkVine since it’s been around longer. But like I said, if you have the cash to spare, go for both like I do because you are going to benefit from more links.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – web traffic is the life blood of any online business. Even if you have the greatest product or website to offer, without traffic your business won’t generate any money. So to help out those who are struggling to get visitors to their websites, I would like to discuss my 4 favorite and most effective channels to drive web traffic.

And the best part of it is – they are free!

So here they are -

Article Marketing
You write informative articles on your particular niche of interest and submit them to article submission sites. The reward comes in 3 ways. First, you can include a resource box with a link to your website. If your article is good, readers will want to visit your website for more good information. Second, if you use a keyword to represent the link, it can help you get ranked in the search engines for that particular keyword. In other words, this helps you in Search Engine Optimization. Third, a reader may pick up your article to put up on his site. As a courtesy, he is obliged to include your resource box and links. This gets you exposure from his readers as well.

Here is a list of the top article submission sites I would recommend you submit your articles to.

Squidoo
Being a Giant Squid who has created more than 150 lenses, I can’t stop telling you how awesome Squidoo is as a source of traffic. The great thing about Squidoo is that it is a very content rich site, and most search engines love content rich sites. With hundreds of thousands of lenses choked full of information, Squidoo lenses find it easy to rank high naturally in search engines. So this means free organic traffic from the search engines for your website if you structure your Squidoo lenses to link cleverly to your own website. But make sure your lenses are related to your niche or your traffic won’t be relevant. The second good thing about Squidoo is that there are already many relevant readers on Squidoo itself, and you can easily get lots of Squidoo visitors if you reach out to other Squids on the Squidoo forum.

Sign up for a free account at Squidoo here.

Forums
For every niche there is almost certainly bound to be a forum or several forums catering to it. In the most popular forums, there are thousands of prospects eager to discuss or learn more about your niche. If you have a good product or website to offer them, they would most certainly be interested.

You can search for forums related to your niche by typing this in search engine – “Your Niche” + forums. For example, if your niche is Golf, you type in ‘golf forums’. You can also visit Big Boards – a directory which compiles the biggest message boards and forums online.

Yahoo Answers
Every day thousands of people visit Yahoo Answers to ask and answer questions. By searching for unanswered questions related to your niche and giving good informative answers, you can get a steady stream of traffic from this website if provide a link to your website. One thing you should realize however is that if you are chosen as the Best Answer, you get the most amount of traffic as your answer will be featured. So be sure to give thought to your answers and try to be as informative and helpful as possible.

Of course there are many other free channels, but I am discussing what work best for me and what certainly work best for many others.

Again, no single channel offers the same results for everyone. There are too many permutations involved. Personality, niche, web content, quality of article, writing style, etc all play a part in determining how effective a channel works for you.

If you are keen to learn more web traffic driving tips, you might like to check out Traffic Ultimatum. I personally found this guide to driving traffic quite comprehensive and a good crash course. The only thing is you will need to invest the time to go through the tutorials. But once you’ve mastered these techniques getting traffic will no longer be a problem to you.

Please leave me a comment below if you find my article helpful.

Following my post on the 4 Main Methods of Blogging For Money, I would now like to touch on something I coin ‘web traffic credentials’.

You might or might not already know, but anything and everything you do on the internet – if you want to make money – you need web traffic. Lots of it. Tons of it. The more the merrier.

Let’s look at the 4 main methods of Blogging for Money and see how web traffic credentials will affect how a web site can monetize.

Sponsored Reviews – When somebody is paying you to review something, they want to see that you have web traffic credentials. They want to see that your site has a steady stream of web traffic every single day. They are not paying you not just for the 200-300 word writeup on their products/services/websites, because they can easily get a ghostwriter to do it for $10. What they are paying you for is the hope that their review on your site will be exposed to X number of readers and the X number of readers will hopefully tell Y number of friends about the review so that they can get maximum exposure. In advertising dollars, a paid review is a great deal for these guys.

Advertising – Advertisers don’t want to advertise on sites which do not have traffic. If you are an advertiser, would you like to advertise in a deserted town or a bustling city? I’ll bet the latter right? So if you have a low traffic site, basically nobody wants to advertise on your site, some ad networks are picky about accepting you and you are left with only good old Google Adsense. Adsense is not bad, but you only earn if you deliver clicks because you can’t get sponsored ads that promise a fixed sum of money every month if you are low traffic. And if your site has low web traffic, who is going to click on your ads?

Affiliate Marketing – Because in affiliate marketing you are simply selling other people’s products and geting a commission for your efforts, vendors usually don’t care if your site is high traffic or low traffic as long as you are selling for them. If you close sales, it’s good news for them. If you don’t, there’s no loss for them. But there’s such a thing as a conversion rate for doing anything online. It basically means out of every X number of people, Y percentage will convert to become paying customers. The numbers are usually between 0.5 to 2% for most affiliate marketing products. So you can imagine if you have only 10 prospects trickling to your website every day, it will take you ages to get even one sale! Web traffic credentials are not important

Selling Your Own Products – The concept here is basically the same as in affiliate marketing. No web traffic, no sales. Little web traffic, little sales. Huge web traffic, high sales. It’s all about conversion rates and conversion ratios.

In summary, web traffic credentials will not affect your opportunity to monetize through affiliate marketing or selling your own products, but it will directly impact your opportunities to get sponsored reviews assignments and advertising placements. However, it is true to say that without good and relevant web traffic, you will find it difficult to monetize through anything.

So how do you determine web traffic credentials for a site? Or rather, what do advertisers see and check before they advertise with you or assign you a sponsored review?

And also, what exactly is relevant traffic and why is it crucial to making money online?

I will cover more of these over my next few posts.

If you are keen to learn web traffic driving tips, you might like to check out Traffic Ultimatum. I personally found this guide to driving traffic quite comprehensive and a good crash course. The only thing is you will need to invest the time to go through the tutorials. But once you’ve mastered these techniques getting traffic will no longer be a problem to you.