Increase Your Web Traffic for Free

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Increasing your site traffic is important, it means the difference between a successful only venture or a waste of time. There are countless ways to increase traffic to your website but writing great content is the best. So let’s take a quick look at how you can get traffic to your site without it costing you anything. Most of these ideas should only take a few minutes, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s worth in when you see your first check.

There are five simple things to keep in mind when trying to get more web visitors for free:

1. Google can only read text. Placing your headings in graphics may look good to a human eye but why are you giving up benefits? Try the sIFR functions at Mikes site instead.
2. Google will only find it if it’s there. Seriously, I know that sounds silly but it’s true. Every week I get people asking me to help them get their websites in the top ten for a category, when I go to their website … the phrases they’re looking for are not even on their website. Use Google’s own Web Master Tools if you want to see what Google sees.
3. Google is a robot. No, not the "come from outer space to kill humanity" type, it’s a spider. When it crawls your website it’s looking for very specific things, so help it along. Take the time to ensure your website is written in a language Google can understand by checking your pages against the The W3C Markup Validation Service.
4. Google rewards fresh content. When the people at Google wrote the program, they knew two things. First, people like to read new stuff and secondly, people don’t like to read old stuff. We don’t actually know a lot about Google (they guard their secrets well) but what we do know is that they reward websites with fresh content. Find a tool like WordPress that lets you prepare content well before it’s launched, that way you can write seven great articles in your downtime and upload them for the whole week ahead.
5. Google likes what others like. Writing a blog that nobody links to is pretty pointless and sadly Google will not reward you for writing a great article if nobody else links to you. Take the time to become active in the community, comment on other peoples blogs, write in forums, take part in discussions, get links from popular websites.
6. Twitter can be used for a lot of cool things including marketing.

In the end, building traffic is hard work but you’ll be rewarded with increased traffic. Do you have any tips for helping to improve traffic to small websites?