No matter what kind of a website you run, whether it's an online store, a community service page, or even just a blog, you need lots of visitors to make your efforts worthwhile. Why bother spending hours upon hours setting everything up perfectly or creating interesting content if no one ever comes by to view the results? Here are three easy steps that you can take to increase web traffic on your site right now.
You can't hope to increase web traffic if nobody knows your site exists, so the first thing you need to do is let all the major search engines know that you're up and running by submitting your URL. Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN) are the obvious places to start, but don't forget places like Ask.com and metasearch engines such as Dogpile, Hotbot, Excite, and Info.com, to name a few. By submitting your URL, you're essentially asking these search engines to send their spiders and bots to crawl your site and index the data. After that, you'll begin showing up in the results pages whenever anyone searches for terms related to your sites, which will in turn increase your web traffic. Yes, these search engines will eventually come around to your website even if you don't submit the URL, but you can significantly speed up the process by doing so.
Another way to increase web traffic is to make sure your sites are search engine optimized. If you're pressed for time or are not sure what you're doing, you can pay a firm to optimize your sites for you. But there are a number of things you can do on your own without spending a dime. For instance, you should decide what kind of keywords you want associated with your sites, and then make sure you inject those words and phrases into any relevant content that you post. Don't overdo it, otherwise the search engines will disregard your website as a worthless spam site. You should also tweak your meta tags and descriptions, as well as page titles. All of this can help increase web traffic in the future.
The third easy step in your effort to increase web traffic is to start an advertising campaign. This of course depends on your goals for the site. If you're simply running a website for fun, then you probably shouldn't bother paying for advertising. But if you're looking to sell merchandise or otherwise make a profit, then you should definitely consider running ads. You don't have to do anything fancy here. A simple Google AdWords campaign can deliver boatloads of visitors, all of whom are highly interested in what you have to offer. After all, they actively clicked links to arrive at your page, didn't they?
These are just a few basic strategies that you can implement to increase web traffic now. There are lots of other options out there too, but the ones I've listed here have proven to be extremely effective and therefore shouldn't be discounted. Try them out for yourself and watch as the visitors start to pour in!