What are the Top 4 Free Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Web Site

So you’ve put up your own website. No doubt about it, this is a terrific way to get your ideas across to other people around the globe while earning money. Having a website is just the beginning. Letting people know of your website’s existence and generating traffic to the site is the more challenging part.

A website with little to no visitors is pretty much invaluable. Yes, increasing traffic to your website is difficult; some people spend a great amount of money just to do this.

Here are the top 4 free ways to increase traffic to your website:

1.  Article Marketing
Attracting website visitors could be done by article marketing. Write three articles pertaining to the core topic of your website, include a brief bio and link to your website. Submit these articles to webmasters, ezine owners, article directories and bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Technorati.

2. Maximize use of links and trackbacks
Links are very useful and powerful parts of your site. Links increase your traffic by getting the search engines to take notice of your site. Links, as the name suggests, help you connect to other bloggers and webmasters who are likely to look up your site too.
Linking up with other websites could also be done by leaving comments and trackbacks on the other site to let them know you’ve linked to them. And people who are browsing are naturally curious and tend to click on these links and trackbacks, increasing web hits to your site!

3. Social Networking, Forums and Webrings
Nowadays, almost everyone has an online profile at social networking sites such Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc for the purpose of sharing questions and ideas with friends and like-minded individuals. The simple act of adding a link in your signature line or profile can increase site traffic because your profile indirectly promotes your website. The more interesting your profile gets, the more people want to know about you and chances are, they will click on your website link too.

In relation to marketing your website through social networking, generating targeted site traffic is essential as well. This can be achieved by joining forums and webrings that are related to the topic of your website. Getting involved in at least three forums in your niche gets you free website visitors. Making yourself visible in these forums by posting and answering questions with an attention grabbing signature (while avoiding spamming people) will get your co-forum members interested in your website thus, increasing traffic.

4. Search Engines
Add your website to Google or Yahoo by submitting your URL to these sites; most search engines have a ‘submit’ link that helps notify them of your site’s existence. Site traffic will be generated because these search engines could possibly include your pages in their search results.
Making use of search engine optimization is also another way of using search engines for driving traffic to your blog. When writing your pages and blog posts, optimize your pages for search engines by including relevant keywords and links.

Increasing traffic to your website can be simple, free and fun. Attracting visitors to your website is similar to attracting people to your life: keep it light, factual/informative and never overdo things (a.k.a. spamming) or you might end up repelling rather than keeping your visitors coming.