Attract Visitors To Your Website - Top 12 Ways

To have success with anything online you need to attract visitors to your website. Writing good content and having a nice looking website is great…but that doesn’t mean you’ll attract visitors. You have to actually put in some work to do this. Luckily though it’s not all that hard!

Here’s the top 10 Ways to attract visitors to your website:

1)  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

SEO is the “art” of understanding why search engines list sites the way they do and optimizing your site based on that knowledge so your site moves up the search engine results. SEO mainly pertains to how you write your articles (using keywords in certain places, etc), how your HTML code is written, and purposely not doing other things that hinder search engine results. Basic SEO techniques are not hard and can really help improve your search engine results. There are also a lot of free plugins or modules you can add to Content Management Systems (like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) that will help with SEO. I could write a book about SEO so I’ll cover this much more extensively in other articles on my website.

2) Article Marketing

To do article marketing you need to:

1. Write articles that are related to your niche (should be about 300 to 800 words)
2. Rewrite those articles as many times as you want (or use a tool to rewrite them for you)
3. Submit all those different versions of the same article to different article directories
4. Include a link in each article back to the individual webpage on your website that you want to boost in the SERPS (search engine results pages)
   •   Use the keyword you are targeting as the anchor text in your link to boost that webpage for that particular keyword term.

Article marketing is great because it does two things for you:

1. Boost your webpages up in the SERPS because you are getting quality links to your website with good anchor text
2. And getting people to come directly to your site from article directory websites

Here’s just a few popular Article Directory sites you can use:

• ezinearticle
• goarticles
• articlesbase

*note-don’t post duplicate content from your website to the article directories because Google hates this and will lower you in the SERPS.

*note-you need to change each article by about 50% for each article directory you post to. If it’s less than that…Google won’t count all those links coming into your website because it will count all of those duplicate articles as just one link coming in.

3) Comment on Relevant Blogs and Forums

Find relevant blogs and forums and make comments on them. If you want your comments to attract people to your website make sure you: 1) make your comments helpful to other people 2) don't spam 3) include your website's URL in your signature (with good anchor text to also help boost your site in the SERPS). Once you start building up creditability on forums and blogs; people will start to visit your website because they think you are helpful and knowledgeable.

*also, Google counts some inbound links in their "search engines results" calculations from the comment sections and forums of some websites. However, the comment sections and forums must not have a "NoFollow" tag.

4) Ask related websites to link to you

Write related websites and ask if they would be willing to place a link on their website to your site. Make sure you tell them who you are, what your site is about, and why it would be beneficial to their readers. Also, specify which page on their website you want your link on. You’d be surprised by how many websites will link to you if they think your site has good content.

5) Social Network Marketing

You can create free groups or fan pages on social networks (like Facebook or Myspace) that can draw attention to your website, help your website gain a following; in turn, helping attract visitors to your website. 

You can also use Twitter to connect with people interested in your niche as well.

6) Free Multimedia Marketing

Produce videos related to your niche and distribute them for free to major multimedia websites like YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, etc. You can also produce other types of multimedia like podcasts and distribute them for free on ITunes. Free multimedia can be extremely effective in driving people to your site if your content is good. Don’t forget to tell people a little about your website in each video or podcast so they know what your site is about and where to find it.

7) Email Marketing

Have a place on your site where people can sign up to be on an email list. Email lists can be a great way for visitors to stay informed about new content and deals on your website. It also further develops your relationship with your visitors. Make sure not to spam your subscribers, send too many emails, or advertise junk or they’ll opt out of your emails quickly. 

8) Social bookmarking

Have bookmarking links on your website (to sites like delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine, etc) so if people like your content they can bookmark it with a click of a button.

Also, have Facebook “like” and “share” buttons in all your content so if people like your content they can just click one button and share it with all their Facebook friends (*note-when I added Facebook “like” buttons to a couple of my websites…it doubled my website traffic!).

*note--adding social bookmarks to your articles is a breeze if you use a content management system like Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla because these CMSs all have plugins/modules to do this for you.

9) Web Directory Submission

Web Directories categorize and link to websites so people can find websites related to a specific topic quickly. You have to submit your website to these directories in order for them to list you. Some directories automatically approve your site and other directories need to approve your site before they list you.

Here are some of the most popular web directories I recommend you submit your website or blog to:

• Dmoz
• Google Directory
• Yahoo Directory
• WebWorldIndex
• 01webdirectory

10) Buy Advertising, PPC

You can buy ad space on other websites or you can pay to be listed on search engines when certain keywords are typed in. You can also create pay per click ads that are placed on other websites. You only pay when someone clicks your advertisement--so this is a no risk way to drive visitors to your site because you only pay when your ads are effective and drive visitors to your site.

Some places you can buy advertising: Google (aka Adsense), Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

11) Place your links on every piece of content on your site

Some of your content may get distributed around the internet (without your permission) so make sure people know where the content is originally from. This way, if someone likes your article they know how to get to your website to learn more. Also, when you place a link on content that is distributed around the internet it builds up the amount of people linking to your site—in turn, boosting your site’s search engine rankings.

12) Create Valuable Website Content

Creating good, original content is the number one thing you can do to drive visitors to your site. Good content is the most important thing you need to focus on when you create your website and it is the number one reason websites (or blogs) succeed or fail.

*note--It is very important to use multiple methods to attract visitors to your website because if one method does poorly, you can rely on the others to still bring in people.

--So What are your thoughts on these 12 methods? Do you have a favorite? Or do you use another method not on this list? Feel free to comment below.

Also, check out this important free report about some new ways to attract visitors to your website.