Once you have built your site, the next step is to attract visitors. Depending on the type of site you might want literally “everyone” to be visiting your site, or you could be aiming at a very particular type of person. There are a number of methods to drive visitors to your site and I will look briefly at the major ones in this article.

Search Engines

Probably the easiest way to attract traffic – and the hardest. Almost 85% of web sites visited begin with a search engine (and in 85% of those the search engine used is Google). Registering your site with search engines is simple but demanding and takes time. For a more detailed look at Search Engines and SEO (search engine optimization) please read the search engine article.

Reciprocal Links

This involves another site (or hopefully a large number of sites) linking to your site. The reciprocal part comes in because you are linking back to them. If you choose the right sites (broadly in common with your own site but hopefully not a direct competitor) then you can gain a reasonable amount of traffic this way. Not only that, but for a good search engine ranking it is vital you have as many reciprocal links as possible.

Getting reciprocal links will never be simple, but in the long run the results can really pay off. My preferred method is to simply email the webmaster of a site you would like to echange links with. Make it short, to the point and where possible include the HTML code you want placed on the other person’s site. Out of every 100 you email at the beginning you will probably get around 2 or 3 to link to you. But keep going, as your site grows more and more will link to you.

There is a number of software programmes around that manage reciprocal links including www.linkmanager.com and www.linkpartners.com is a good place to start if you are doing it manually.

Remember that for search engine purposes your link wants to be x2cms Website Builder rather than a simple www.x2cms.com, getting your keywords in the anchor text is vital.

It is always a good idea to make it really easy for people to request reciprocal links on your site too – take a look at www.x2cms.com/links.html as an example.

Pay Per Click Advertising

There are a number of PPC or CPC (cost per click) advertising services around, the biggest being Google Adwords and Overture. PPC on the search engines involves your chosen text being placed in a prominent position when your chosen keywords are entered. For example, PPC adwords appear in Google in boxes on the right hand side of the results. This is often a good way of gaining traffic while you don’t yet have the natural search engine listings you would like – after all, if you are appearing in the first page of a search for your keywords in Google why would you pay for another appearance?

Despite the fact that statistics show 80% of people prefer the “natural” search engine results to clicking on ad generated results, Adwords and Overture provide a great deal of traffic to a great deal of sites - particularly those in crowded and competitive markets.

Typically PPC campaigns are based around a bid per click – so you bid an amount (i.e. $0.10c) and for each “click” you are charged 0.10$. If another site is bidding $0.12 per click then they will typically appear before your advert and appear more often when your keywords are searched.

Google Adwords - http://adwords.google.com
Overture - http://www.overture.com

Banner Advertising

This involves placing your banner on a site for a fixed period of time. This can be a fixed position, where your banner is always shown on a certain page or range of pages, or it can be a rotated position where your advert will be shown once every 3 times that page is loaded (assuming there were 3 other advertisers).

Pricing can be per day, week month or even per click where you are charged per click on the banner. It pays to only place your banner on sites that are already carrying a broadly relevant type of traffic to your own site and to shop around for the best deals.

Banner Exchanges

Banner exchanges work by placing your banner on other sites who have signed up for the exchange. In return, your site carries other sites banners. Banner exchanges typically work on a ratio basis of 2:1 or 3:1 – so for every time your banner appears on someone else’s site you must have shown someone else’s sites banner twice or three times on your own site.

Despite their popularity, it’s difficult to tell how much traffic banner exchanges really produce. If you have a broad, wide ranging site that would suit a lot of different visitors then they can be ideal. On the other hand if you have a particularly niche market advertising to a lot of people on www.britney4eva.com won’t do you a great deal of good.

Mainstream Advertising

If you offer a product or service, consider advertising in your local paper, yellow pages, directories and business centers. Often inexpensive these are ideal ways to drive traffic to your site and is an ideal method while you wait for the search engines to place you at number one ;)

Pop-Up’s, Pop-Unders etc

Similar to banner exchanges these types of “traffic exchange” usually work on a ratio system. When someone opens another website a new window will either pop-up or pop-under the site that has been opened with the content of your site or a link to your site contained within the window.

You will be required to make some changes to the code of your site to allow the pop-up and again, it is hard to tell just how much traffic you may be receiving from this type of approach. Essentially you are showing your site to people who more than likely have no interest in it whatsoever and will just close the window. Broad interest sites like online casinos etc do very well from this type of approach – it’s unlikely a site selling flowers in Ohio would do so well ;)

Guaranteed Traffic Delivery, Email opportunities, Scams and other methods

There is always someone who will present a new way to gain traffic – often an amount is guaranteed and the cost is relatively small. The simple truth to most of these systems is they are a scam, and whatever you are promised you will never receive. If it was possible to get 10,000 visitors a month/week etc just by paying someone $50 I could have saved the time it took to write this article and just put a link at the top of the page to where you had to pay your $50!

Remember that no matter the number of visitors, it is often the quality that is the important part. If you have 100 visitors a month and they buy products from you that is far more valuable than 10,000 who look at your site for 5 seconds and move on.

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