How to attract traffic to your website

Getting visitors to your website is a vital part of online marketing. Most business owners underestimate the value of targeted traffic, and site users don't understand its importance, either. As is the case with real estate, web traffic is all about location, location, location. If the site is in a busy area, it will get more visitors.

If you buy a classified ad in a newspaper, you pay more to get your ad placed in a more visible spot. The same holds true for websites- if you can attract a higher amount of traffic to your site, then you can charge a higher rate for advertising. This article will give you some handy free and paid ways to drive traffic to your site.

Market with videos

It's as easy as making a short video and uploading it to Youtube or another popular video sharing site. However, to make video marketing attract more visitors to your site, your videos need to contain relevant, engaging content.

Market with written articles

This involves the writing of relevant, readable articles and submitting them to article directories. These articles need to rank near the top for certain keywords, but due to a recent algorithm shift by Google, this may not be such an effective strategy anymore.

Search engine optimization

Involves getting your site to the top of the search engines by optimizing it according to the engine's preferences. Google is the most popular search engine, and optimizing your site to fit what Google is looking for will certainly gain you a lot of targeted traffic.

Use the online classifieds

Many of these sites have a lot of visitors, just looking for bargains. If you advertise your business here, you can get a fair amount of targeted traffic. However, each of these sites has different criteria for posting ads, so due to the amount of effort involved, this may not be the most efficient strategy.

MSN AdCenter/Google AdWords

You can pay the major search engines to advertise there, on a pay-per-click basis. The traffic generated in this way is very highly targeted, making this one of the most efficient strategies.

Facebook ads

You can pay to advertise on Facebook in a similar way. You have the option to pay per click, or per thousand page impressions.

You can also buy banner ads on certain sites and pay them every month to feature a banner that links to your website.

The above are the most efficient free and paid strategies for getting traffic to your website. Free advertising strategies typically take longer to see the results of your efforts. For paid strategies, you need to have a profitable product before you begin advertising, so you don't lose money.