Drive Traffic to Your Site



If you ask a business advisor about the best place to set up a café, you’d most likely be advised

to buy or lease a commercial property within a busy mall or at a busy intersection. Why?

It’s the foot traffic; you want many people passing or walking by your establishment. The

more people who pass by, the more people will come in to try your service.

It’s not so different in the internet. If you have a virtual establishment online, then you’d

better drive traffic to your site. You may make the best calligraphy work online, but if

people cannot see your work to judge its merit you would be unlikely to get any customers;

and people would not see your work if they cannot even find your website in the complex and

gigantic labyrinth of the net. You simply cannot sell to people who are not around to

appreciate what you have to offer.

The following are some of the means for driving traffic to a website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

People commonly use a search engine to find whatever information, product or service that

they need online. These search engines keep an extensive database of websites that their

spiders (or crawlers) find in the net. These sites are indexed for words (people call these

keywords) and when a particular keyword is entered by a search engine user, a list containing

the sites that are relevant to this keyword will be generated. People are much more likely

to visit the most relevant sites – the top ten results.

To drive traffic to your website, therefore, you must make sure that your website is part of

the search engines’ database and that it has been properly optimized so that it can be deemed

relevant to the keywords that your potential customers are likely going to use to find a company

like yours.

Pay-per-Click Advertising

SEO could be very tedious and it could take a very long time before its effects can be felt.

To get more search engine traffic without waiting as long for results, you can try pay-per-click

(PPC) advertising with search engines.

With PPC, you can associate your ad with a keyword or keywords which you have bid for, and

when these keywords have been searched, your PPC ad will appear at the right of the top search

engine results. Your PPC ads will give your website instant exposure and this will drive traffic

to your site.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is the equivalent of advertising by referral; that is, you should post content

that would make people want to pass it on to others and inspire them to click on your link and

thereby drive traffic to your site. One way of doing this is by posting ‘viral’ video content

(videos that people can’t resist forwarding to their friends) at YouTube.