Increase Website Traffic -- 4 Methods That Work

There are many methods that work to increase website traffic. Unfortunately, a number of the techniques being promoted are known as "black hat" and will either ultimately get you in trouble, or will only work for a very short period of time. Since you want your Web business to be around for a long time, it might be a better move to spend your time on something more lasting.

Instead of talking about sneaky methods and tricks, I'd like to cover a few of the "white hat" techniques that can bring lasting traffic. These aren't particularly flashy, but they produce results. The best thing about these techniques is that they'll keep producing traffic over many months and years.

1. Article marketing -- Using article marketing to increase website traffic offers several major benefits. First, the article marketing sites themselves often have high authority with Google and offer excellent backlinks, which can drive up your search engine rankings. Second, because of the authority that these sites have, your posted articles will often rank high in the engines.

Third, these high profile sites create a viral effect and other website owners will pick up your articles and publish them. This increases your reach and your backlinks. Fourth, when people read your article and then decide to click through to your site, they're showing enough confidence in your content to want to read more. These are pre-sold visitors.

2. Social bookmarking -- Social bookmarking is an activity that can have great rewards for your site. It's easy to create a number of links back to your sites by social bookmarking a few pages. You can also encourage your visitors to do this for you by placing icons with links to popular social bookmarking sites. In addition, you can increase traffic to your own websites by bookmarking sites that link to yours.

3. Building content -- When in doubt, build more content. More pages on your site equate to more PageRank, more opportunities for adding in keywords that the search engines will pick up on, more pages to link to, and more information for your visitors. All of this adds up to increasing website traffic. I own a domain name because someone built an online store at the same time I was building a content site on the same subject, with almost the same name. The store is gone, my content site is still there, and I own that former online store's domain name.

4. Social media -- Digg and some of the other larger social sites are a difficult sell. It's great for a link or two, but your odds of getting large amounts of traffic from Digg are slim. While people are out there trying to game Digg, you should be out there rewriting your content and placing it on Squidoo, Hubpages, and other social sites. These sites offer excellent backlinks, as well as a way to reach audiences you might not otherwise reach.

Increasing website traffic with these methods will produce lasting results, as opposed to some of the risky, flash-in-the-pan methods that so many are suggesting these days. Start incorporating one or more of these techniques, and you're sure to see an increase in visitor count.