Driving More Traffic to Your New Website: Do’s And Don’ts
August 27th, 2009Getting quality website traffic is of the utmost importance for your business. As an internet entrepreneur, you have a lot of responsibilities. You have to build the website, come up with content, keep updating the site, and drive traffic. However, none of the responsibilities are more important than driving traffic. Without getting consistent quality website traffic, your business is as good as done. While we all know it is critical, many people have no idea how to build the kind of traffic they need. So how exactly do you generate traffic to your site?
Users believe that a website with a lot of traffic must have something interesting or useful, and this is generally a correct assumption. Marketers in turn can cash in on this phenomenon by putting ads on high-traffic web pages. Of course, getting website traffic is trick to maximizing the efficacy of these methods. So how does one entice users to check out certain web pages or websites and in turn increase the likelihood of their seeing a certain ad?
The right stuff
The key to getting website traffic requires the information that users want to see in your website. You can even stretch that into a pun: the write stuff. In the past, web pages were filled mostly with text, due to bandwidth constraints. Today, transmission bandwidths and speeds are continuously expanding, opening the way for a more engaging experience with images, videos, sounds, and interactive elements. Nonetheless, without well-made advertising material and web content, the website will fail to instill attention and wont garner much traffic. Try to get as much specific data on the product or service to be advertised, from textual descriptions to photographs and even videos and audio recordings. Prepare all this in a way that is cohesive and consistent, so the user can get a good feel for it. Of course, some content that can be construed as frivolous is forgivable, but try to keep the content consistent.
Just enough fluff
To have a more immersive and informative experience, it is important to have the right amount of fluff, in the figurative sense, on your website. Notice that the websites that gets the most Internet traffic either offer incomparable services or well-executed design elements. These design elements are layout, visual appeal, audio appeal if applicable, and user-friendliness. A balance must be struck between flashy audio-visual elements and utility. If your web page is striking and appealing but takes forever to load, that is sure to kill some interest. It should be easy to navigate between pages, and easy to look up specific items. A well-tuned search facility should be available, especially if you have a lot of data. On that same line of logic, sorting functions for data presentation will increase usability and interest.
When you have links on your site from other sites or vice versa, it will give more weight to your website in the eyes of search engines. It will also improve the chances of generating traffic to your website. However, you should pick the sites to link and get linked to. The best websites to get linked and link to would be those that are related to your own.