How to increase traffic to your website for free?

Why Advertise

Really the answer to that question is simple. You have to Advertise, Advertise, Advertise...

Of course, you can always hire people to advertise for you, if only you had ton of money, which we usually don't. But I will teach you "How to increase traffic to your website for free?"

It is easy and simple.

A lot of people think that getting visitors to their website is very hard, it takes a lots of time and end up wasting a lots of money. In some ways its true, but if you know how to work the Internet, then you can still get ton of free traffic and only spent maybe an hour or less once a month.

How to increase traffic to your website for free?

• HTML tags - Spend some time to learn HTML tags. It's very easy. Your webpage or website is nothing more than hypertext markup language tags or HTML. Your web browser knows what to do with these tags when you open your webpage files. As far as search engine optimization (SEO) goes, there are only few tags you should really be concerned with.
• Title Tag -Title tag is one of the most important (and easiest) SEO facets of your website. The HTML title should set the overall theme of that page. Each page within your website should have an unique HTML title. Think of a HTML title as the top of the outline for that particular website page. It should be descriptive and must contain your top keyword phrases.
• ALT tag - it stands for alternative. Alt tag or attribute is used in conjunction with image (IMG) tag. The alt attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it (because of slow connection, an error in the src attribute, or if the user uses a screen reader). But it is not only used by your browser to display words in place of an image also search engines scan these alt tag words as keywords. So, when people search for these words in a search engine, your website is likely to be listed in the search result page.
• Meta Tag - is also know as metadata. Metadata is data (information) about data. The <meta> tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable. Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata. The metadata can be used by browsers (how to display content or reload page), search engines (keywords), or other web services.

• Picture - When we visit a webpage or website, you will notice that almost always it will have some sort of image embedded somewhere within its page. It is not a coincidence that people are embedding or placing images in their website. Search Engines are not just website with search box anymore. You can search for a websites or images or videos by entering their name. That means search engine bots like GoogleBot or website crawler will take note and index your images from within your web server. So, having an image in your website or webpage increases your chance of being found on the Internet. In fact, you can go one step further when it comes to using image on your website. Remember I mentioned ALT tag for image above. Well, search engines love this attribute as well. It will index your images along with your alt text. Thus, it further helps to be found on the Internet. On one of my blog I have a picture of an American flag with alt text "American flag" for it and I have noticed that just from that image alone I have been getting 1000's of hits according to my web stat.

• Videos - Need I explain what they are? Since the days of Google Videos, we have come to accept videos as an expected feature of every websites or webpage. Having your website video posted on the internet or linking to a video from the internet on your website is one more ways you can gain traffic to your website(s). In fact, you should have videos for all of your website(s) if you have more than one. As in the case of Youtube.com, you can post your video with your website information back to your site. The more interesting your video is the more hits you will have on Youtube and thus more chance people are going to visit your website. I have a website that serves online flash games. Guess what, I've made videos for each and every flash games (over 100) I have on my website and they are all posted on Youtube.com and elsewhere. Not only are these videos are being served to the world by Youtube on your behalf but they are also being picked up and linked to your videos by other websites serving similar content. So, then the real question is "How do you create videos?" 
• On Windows operating system (OS), if you are not too crazy or picky on what programs to use for your video creation, then the simplest and the easiest program for creating video is Movie Maker. Besides it comes with your operating system already. If not, then you need to download it at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/get-movie-maker-download. So, you don't need to purchase anything. If you are worried about not having any content to create your video with, then you shouldn't be because you can still create video without anything but animated texts or if you have bunch of pictures on your hardrive that you don't care if the world sees it you can use that to make your video.
• Run your Movie Maker on your Windows OS.
• If you want to import videos or pictures or music from your hardrive to Movie Maker, click on the appropriate commands to the left.
• Then, you should see a time line below for video, audio and titles.
• Assuming you don't have anything to create your video with, you can just create clips with texts on it that's all. Say for instance, title could say, "How to increase traffic to your website for free?"
• Then, stretch the clip to desired length of time and you title.
• Now, test run your video right from within your Movie Maker. You probably noticed that the Movie Maker has a lot of other features. They are there to make your video more fancier like transformation, etc. You can spend a lot of time doing that. That's up to you.
• At this point, you probably didn't hear any music or sound from your video when you played it. That means you need to add music or audio file to your video. Now, this is optional. If you are going to post this video on Youtube.com, then you don't need to have your own music in your video. That's because once you upload your video on Youtube, they you give you thousands of music or audio files you can apply to your videos. These music according to Youtube is free for you to use.
• After you are satisfied with your video, title and musics, you can "Save Movie File" option from your main file pull-down menu. It will prompt you to enter name for the video and location. Once you finish, it will be saved into your hardrive.
• Now, you can upload your video to Youtube or similar websites.
• Once you upload, you will have to make sure on those website you leave or post your direct URL or link back to your website. After that you are done.

• Article Directories - another easy way to increase traffic to your website is by simply writing article about your website or related contents and posting them on article directories like Ezine. This website hosts many articles written by people just like you on many subjects. You will notice that at the end of each and every articles there is information about the author and any of their website information. Well, this is how it works. Once you finish writing your article, you will submit it to article directories. If your article is very popular and a lot of people like it, then they are allowed to download your article and post it on their website exactly as you posted it with all of your information including author information (YOU). In a matter of days you could have 100s if not 1000s of traffic. Again, you have to write something interesting and popular that's related to your website that you are trying to promote. I will list number of popular article directories.
• Ezine.com
• GoArticles.com
• ArticleCity.com

• Submitting to major search engines MONTLY- I am sure you are saying to yourself, "Obviously." However, some people tend to think once they submit their website to the major search engines for the FIRST TIME they are done. WRONG! It is highly recommended that you submit your website to the search engine once a month. Even though some search engine do crawl websites on a routine basis, it is not guaranteed that they will get to your website this month or the next or even month after the last. I do this all the time. Granted I don't remember to do it every month, but I made it a habit to do it. Plus, I have a reminder on my desktop that lets me know once a month to submit my website to the search engines. Submitting tells the search engine to schedule a date for crawling your website - usually within weeks. Does this help to bring traffic? You betcha. Because every time a search engine visits your website, it will look for any new contents or changes to your website and if you did add or update contents, it will make notes and index them on the search engine. I usually use websites where you can just enter your website information and click the submit button. Then, it goes out and submits to all the available major search engines. Important note: Don't submit the same website twice within a month. If you do, there is a good chance your website might get banned from their server. However, most of them all accept once a month submission.

• Link Exchange - I have heard that exchanging links on the Internet is not accepted form of practice for the purpose of increasing your website traffic. On the contrary, it is one of the major ways in which one can bring ton and ton of traffics to their website. Sure, Google search engine may have changed their search algorithm to counteract against link exchange, but your site linked to 100s of other websites serving similar content is not only going to bring you more traffic but also make your website more popular such that your website Rank on the Internet will go up i.e. Google Page Rank, Alexa Rating, etc. I try my best to exchange link with some website everyday. "How to exchange links?" 
• Link Exchange Directories
• LinkMarket.net
• AutomaticBacklinks.com
• Posting or reviewing comments on blogs or message board with your site information as part of your signature. 

• Social Networking - That's right. The more places on the Internet you advertise your website on the more traffic you are going to get. Plus, social networking on the Internet is Free. Why not advertise your website on these websites like on FaceBook.com, Myspace.com, etc. All of my websites have facebook page.

 

• Content - Last but not least, all these techniques are for nothing, if you don't have real contents to serve to the world. If your website is all about cookies, then any and all information should be about cookies and there should be lots of it and new or updated contents every so often. Again, content is the key. Also, you should make sure that your content has popular keywords. So, that when people actually search for cookie related information or content, your webpages show up in the search result hopefully on the first page.

So, there you have it. If you follow these techniques, you are sure to get tons of traffic to your website in no time all for FREE.