So You’ve Just Launched Your Website And Now You Need Traffic

Launching a website is not really the same as launching a new shop. There are some similarities, but the major difference is you will not have people or visitors walking down the street and suddenly spotting you. The internet requires people to search for what they are looking for, be it via search engines, links from other sites or directories, the main way people will find you will be by looking for you or the product or service you are offering.

Once your website is up and running, you have filled it full of good quality content and made sure its working, is navigable and looks the business, you then need to start getting people to find you. For my clients, I usually recommend the following to get the early traffic to their site, and you can choose to do some or all of them to make the biggest impact.

Cost Per Click – With any new client, I always recommend a small but periodic cost per click campaign with Google and Yahoo and if the clients needs fits right, I will also look at the Facebook campaigns, which can work very well for some kinds of clients. For the first year of a website, you are going to struggle to get a decent and consistent level of natural traffic, despite what everyone says and claims. Google takes a good year to work out what your site is about, how worthy you are of good SERPs and to balance a consistent ranking. A small CPC campaign doesn’t have to cost much and can mean the difference of having little traffic to having good traffic from day one, which is important in the first year of any project.

Press Releases – Tell the world about your new site by release Press Releases. There are many free press release sites out there, with some offering a very cheap paid service like OfficialWire, which gets your story all over the internet and into Google News. These press releases should pick up a little bit of traffic, but more importantly they give you instant links back to your site and start to make your name in Google, especially if you are clever and thoughtful with the title and content of your press release.

Article Submissions – Following on from the press releases, write a couple of articles, sign up to the free article sites, like Ezine Articles and Articles Base and start submitting your articles to them. All of these sites offer you a good audience, a link back to your own site and the chance to start to become some kind of authority on your subject. I often get told by clients that the service or product they offer, they can not write anything about it. This is total nonsense. If you were making and selling crockery pots, you could write about how you make them, things to avoid, how to make a perfect pot and many more. There is ALWAYS something you can write about in your field of expertise.

One Way Directory Links – This time consuming but worthwhile project needs to be started immediately and spread out over the course of your website and business. There are listings of thousands of free directories and also paid directories, but make sure you have the main ones covered and then start building links over a period of time. Try to keep the directories relevant, make sure they are indexed and vary your anchor text to try and capture relevant keywords. This won’t get you loads of traffic, but might pick up the odd few visitors, with a view to it making an impact later down the road.

Run A Blog – Google loves blogs and so do many people who currently frequent the internet. Set your self up a blog or use a blog integration service and start writing good quality content and on topic and relevant articles etc. Then, start submitting your blog to all of the blog directories, RSS readers and blog submission sites to start getting good traffic. Make sure your blog has a good amount of content before doing this, as most of the sites need to see a high level of effort before accepting you in their listings.

Social Bookmarking – Use a social bookmarking service or do it yourself, either way, get out on the social sites like Facebook, Digg and thousands of others and start telling the world about your sites. Bookmark your site, your articles, your content and your services; make sure everyone knows about what you are doing. On the flip side, only do this if you genuinely have something good to show the world, else people will just end up considering you a spammer, and this is not what you want.

Blog Comments – There will be many other related and relevant sites out there, many of which are looking for blog comments and even guest writers. Get out and find a list of relevant websites, start commenting on existing blogs and offer to write some content for the blog itself. Once again, if you are going to do this, make sure you are genuinely contributing something to each blog, else you just end up spamming other peoples work and there will be few that take kindly to that.

By: Clear Web Services

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimisation and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales. He has worked in the SEO and Internet Marketing world for many years, and working in partnership with another company has launched the new SEO business. clearwebservices.com/ For More Information, please call 01594 835 857 or email info@clearwebservices.com