How to get more visitors to your web site

This is one of the questions that every webmaster wants to know the answer to. One of the main objectives of this website, SEO best practices, is to help business owners get more visibility on the Internet. I have written about getting visitors, but it has been in separate posts, I thought it might be helpful to put it all together in a few posts.

Driving visitors to your website is a combined effort of various activities, it starts by something as small as letting your friends know that you have a site and get their feedback and asking them to spread the word around (I hope you have not shied away from doing this) and it does not really end anywhere; it is continuous process of finding different ways of getting visitors. SEO is all about this, it ensures that your web site is optimized and ready for visitors and search engines.

Here are some basics to get you started on your mission to get more visitors/traffic to your site –

Search engines:

Your site will by default get indexed by search engines sooner or later. You might want to register into Google and Bing webmaster tools, in order to not only get the search engines to index all the pages of your web site, but also to get a lot of useful information and reports on your website’s performance.

Search directories:

There are not very many search directories as such, but Yahoo directory and Dmoz are still worth submitting to. Yahoo! is a paid option but I would recommend that you consider suggesting your web site for inclusion in Yahoo! directory because it will be a worthwhile and valuable submission, and will certainly result in relevant traffic to your site.

Local listings and Maps:

If your business caters to a specific geographic region, or even if not, it is important that you consider getting your business listed in the local Google and Bing directories. That way you are ensured that your business can be found even if people do not know your business name. The map and location will help people locate where you are, and to get directions.

High traffic portals:

You might want to suggest your website, for consideration, to a portal that specifically caters to your industry. It is worth being listed especially if the portal is a high volume relevant traffic portal. If there is no option to have a listing, you might want to contribute articles or guest posts for free so that you get some amount of visibility from there.

Forums:

Forums are a wonderful way of connecting to prospective clients and get you some potential clients at least. Helping out people with suggestions helps in generating goodwill for your business. It is important that people trust you, and once they find that you are indeed there to help them and your suggestions are good, they will want to know more and land up on your site.

To be continued…