Before you try any strategy to increase search engine traffic, I suggest you run a deep analysis of your website to see what works and what doesn’t. For new websites, a bit of reading could prevent avoid major pitfalls in online marketing. It is important to learn how to draw traffic from major search engines like Yahoo! and Google, because these get you access to the most targeted visitors. There are quite a number of tools available that allow the website owner to analyze the amount of traffic coming from search engines; you basically calculate the percentage of visitors.

The analysis as such consists in checking the log files of your website over a specific period of time; it all depends on the number of visitors and the topics that your site covers. It will take from several days to several weeks to come up with a reliable database of search queries, but you’ll have where to extract knowledge from. A common problem that web marketers are not always aware of is that some of the pages don’t get hits from the search engines. You will then have to determine why these pages do not attract visitors. Solving this problem will increase search engine traffic visibly!

In most cases this problem appears with auxiliary pages in the website when they pose little interest for visitors. Most web marketers do not worry that much over auxiliary pages, and they are probably right. But if key pages remain unvisited by web surfers, this is a serious warning! The common factors that leave a key page unnoticed by search engines include:

-page size, too large pages are difficult to index by search engine crawlers;
-links may be invalid or difficult to detect when they are located in a menu with complex Java Script code;
-the website has a very deep structure which leaves the deeper pages undetected.

Another problem that may prevent traffic from reaching your pages lies in invalid coding. In order to prevent problems and make sure that all of the content gets correctly indexed, you should try an HTML code validation service. When viewing the pages in the browser it could be difficult to detect the errors, but in the validation process, all the errors become visible. You should be able to increase search engine traffic without other challenges if the code is corrected.

If you submit your pages to professional investigations, you should get the answer to your problem sooner than by investigating yourself.

There is a common belief among Internet marketers that free article marketing works wonders for business growth, and to some extent this is correct. Article marketing could be a real gold mine if you know how to use it. The whole world wide web depends on content, but fresh, truly original materials are hard to find. Most of the articles we read are compilations, versions of other materials already published a few dozens if not hundred of times on the web. Where’s the novelty? Just in words…

The online mechanism that defines free article marketing consists in the submission or publication of unique materials in article directories, forums, social networks, newsletters, press releases, white papers and the like. But where do all these materials come from? Not every publisher or web developer is a writer; content is usually outsourced and often modified through software programs called article spinners that come up with new versions of a unique article, paragraph by paragraph. The eagerness to produce more and more such materials is that articles create backlinks pointing to the official website.

The direct consequence of backlinking is traffic increase, page rank increase and more prospects. Uniqueness of content is not the same thing with originality; every material can be relevant for free article marketing as long as the word order, the sentences and the paragraphs are arranged in a new form. From this perspective, we are witnessing a deterioration in the quality of the content distributed around the world wide web. Real originality in writing still defines news articles. Controversies, debates and informative materials about events remain the breath of fresh air in Internet free article marketing.

In fact the most successful at free article marketing are websites with informative content; those pages that keep readers informed on events, trends, innovations and the like. Blogs are another example of fresh content sources. Blogs focus on niches; they began as online diaries and a way for people to express their beliefs, opinions, thoughts and feelings. They are now one of the most powerful sides of the Internet, and they continue to grow. With every new entry, a blogger pushes web content a step further.

Originality, not uniqueness, remains the true heart of the Internet, and if marketers want to succeed on the long term, they should produce content that is totally new and fresh, at least once in a while. Nobody is interested in reading the same thing in other words, and even if these are tricks to achieve business exposure, they still need to be backed up by quality.

There are several things you can do to increase traffic for a website: build links, list the website in directories, write articles to create backlinks, write press releases, work on social networks, develop forum and blog activity, perform regular search engine optimization, and the list goes on. I’ll briefly refer to some of these to just pinpoint how strategies can increase the number of web surfers that land on a specific web page.

Link building!

A web surfer visits a page and after going through the content, he/she checks relevant links to expand the search. This is how web visitors from other web pages reach yours. But you continuously need to improve link building, particularly to achieve one-way links. The more links you get from related websites, the bigger the chances to increase traffic.

Search engine optimization!

Try to think like your customers! Be a customer! Do this whenever you select keywords to perform search engine optimization. You can’t increase traffic if you don’t know what people want, what they would be interested in. Unique keywords, longer keyword phrases could make the difference between success and failure when it comes to traffic. Closely monitor your keywords in order to see which appear more frequently in queries. Those will be your little gold mine!

Article marketing

Write articles and distribute them across the web to increase traffic by superior business exposure. Most marketers are now fully aware of the importance of content for the success of their business; word goes by backlinks. People reach a website by navigating from link to link, and you can significantly increase traffic by providing fresh, original content on a regular basis. Most article directories that provide submission services are free; hence you invest close to nothing, yet you gain immensely.

Forums and social networks

You can increase traffic by posting comments on forums and social networks. Every entry should include your signature with a link to your website so that the interested reader could check the page. It is important to follow the publication rules so that you don’t have your comments deleted by forum moderators.

Okay, so you increase traffic, but it doesn’t stop here. You have to push things forward over and over again, meaning that it is never enough. A higher number of visitors only means that some of them will perform a transaction, and from this group, an even smaller percent will actually buy something. This is why you have to keep your website attractive for relevant web surfers.

The strategies used by web marketers to increase free traffic seem like a gold mine; however, not everybody manages to convert visitors into customers. In fact, 90% if not more of website visitors don’t convert into clients. Many people use the Internet for information only. They want to read news or get details on a specific problem, but they don’t want to buy anything. The real deal is to manage to convince as many people as possible to act on a website and ultimately perform a purchase.

Many mistakes are made when trying to increase free traffic, and the biggest problems appear when people use black hat tactics to promote their businesses. Many website owners have found their pages banned by search engines because the companies they collaborated with used dishonest promotional tactics. Lots of problems also appear because of the tough competition. The big issue comes from the fact that both you and your competitors target the same web surfers or market segment. And there is seldom a fair share in this!

Let’s take for instance the two Google advertising programs: Adwords and Adsense. A huge level of fraudulent activity has been registered for both. In the case of Adwords, when you increase free traffic you can lose lots of money when you get many irrelevant clicks on the ads. A dishonest practice here used by competitors was to hire people to click on the ads of other businesses with the deliberate purpose of causing money waste. The other extreme was registered with Adsense where Google pays the website owner for every click on an ad. Some web marketers use the strategy of multiple clicks to make more money.

As it happens with everything else in life, there are two sides of the coin, and the same holds true for every attempt to increase free traffic. The choice of methods, strategies and approach influence the success of the business as such, and positive results appear only for highly relevant web visitors. Therefore, you have to do your best in order to target web surfers that are most likely to convert into customers.

Numerous web pages provide guidance for traffic increase, link building, search engine optimization strategies, article marketing and the like. All these are closely interrelated in a complex network; what you do with one influences the rest. Keep this in mind because full understanding of the bigger picture keeps you on top!