Free Ways to Increase Website Traffic

The internet is a big place. It’s easy for smaller sites lacking a dedicated marketing staff to get lost amongst the competition. But that knowledge is no consolation for website owners staring at a hit counter that seems to never move. These lonely website owners need free ways to increase website traffic and they do Cost Effective Surveys to keep check on website traffic.

Optimizing Website Content

The most important thing a website owner can do to increase traffic to his site is to optimize his content. For the sake of improving placement in Google search engine results page website owners should focus on the following:

1. Title: Avoid trying to be clever when crafting a title for a page in a website. The title of the page should give a clear indication of what the page is about. Site branding should come either before or after the page description, separated by either a pipe or colon character. Titles should be limited to 65 characters or less.
2. Description: The META description tag should both lure potential visitors in and contain keywords that visitors would use to find the site in search engines. This is where cleverness and creativity can pay off. Descriptions should be limited to 160 characters in length.
3. Keyword Density: Keyword density is calculated by measuring the number of times a word or phrase appears within the content as a percentage of the content total. Melissa Luther indicates in an article for Hostway Web Resources that a “keyword density of 1 to 5 percent provides good rankings”. Website owners can check the keyword density of their pages using this free keyword density tool.

Good website optimization is critical for achieving high visibility in Google SERPs. If a website is performing poorly, tweaking the title, description and body content for keyword density may help improve rankings significantly. However, even when a page seems perfectly tailored to a target keyword or phrase it still might not perform as well as the website owner would like. What other free ways to increase website traffic are at his disposal?

Building Backlinks to Increase Website Visibility in SERPs

While many SEO companies are willing to sell thousands of poor quality backlinks cheaply, website owners should either take the time to do their own backlink building or outsource the work to a reputable professional (who will certainly charge dearly for his labor). That said, it’s relatively easy albeit time consuming to get good quality backlinks to a website.

Article marketing is becoming a very popular way to build backlinks to a web site. Website owners share a little bit of their knowledge in their field of expertise on sites like EZineArticles and GoArticles, and in exchange they are allowed a good quality dofollow backlink to their website. In addition to the exposure gained on these article directories, website owners can in some cases optionally allow syndication of their articles on other websites. If an article is well written and informative it can result in a flow of many quality backlinks back to the owner’s website.

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can vastly increase a website’s exposure to potential visitors and can make it easier to keep in contact with past visitors. Integrating code for widgets that allow visitors to ‘like’ content, making it visible to all of their friends, is simple on many publishing platforms.

Website owners can also post listings in free online classifieds like Craigslist. Such popular classified sites can provide website owners with a steady stream of visitors even when Google SERPs are poor. In the case of Craigslist and many other classified sites, website owners can incorporate elements of HTML into their listings to format a visually appealing ad containing images.

The Best Free Ways to Increase Website Traffic

Though there are many other methods that can be employed to increase website traffic, website optimization should probably be a website owner’s first focus. If this alone isn’t enough to boost rankings to an acceptable level in Google SERPs, website owners can also engage in link building via article marketing, social networking and classified posting. Employing these methods can vastly improve the flow of traffic to most websites.