Attracting Visitors To A New Website

When you create a new website, no matter what its purpose, your first goal will be to attract some visitors. Without traffic, your site may as well not exist. But how do you achieve this? The key is to understand the nature of the web.

It is a network; a series of connections; and if you can create routes to your website from other places, people will find them and use them. They may then create new routes. That is the essence of marketing a website.

Ways to Attract Visitors to A New Website

SEO

Search engine optimization is one aspect of this. When people need to find something online, they generally search for it using Google or another search engine. They are then presented with appropriate links and if one of these links leads to your site, you stand a good chance of getting a visit. SEO is about finding ways to exploit, maximising the traffic you receive as a result of search queries.

These days, many optimization ploys double up as conventional forms of marketing. This is because the search engines try and use the same signals that people use in order to deduce the value and relevance of a website. If people are talking about your site and linking to it, it is considered to be something of value and will be more likely to appear in relevant search results.

You can write press releases and guest blogs to increase the profile of your site, but you also need to ensure that it is clear and usable. Give people what they need and the search engines will recognize this. Remember also that search engine optimization is a long, ongoing process. The sites you are competing against may be long established and so it can take a while to reach their level.

[Image Source: webfosys.com]

Advertising

There are many forms of online advertising, but one of the most popular is pay per click. This is a system whereby you only pay for advertising space when someone actually clicks your advert. The benefits of this are obvious, you only have to pay for what you get, so investment is less of a punt.
The most popular form of pay per click is Google’s AdWords service.

This allows you to place ads not just on relevant websites in the AdWords network, but also, more importantly, on search results pages. You can then therefore target certain search terms which are relevant to your site. It is a bit like receiving a leg-up in the search engines as you can appear at the top of a results page without being an established site.

Social media

One of the keys to marketing a website is working out where your target demographic spends time on line and then trying to reach them there. These days, a lot of people spend a large proportion of their internet time on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

If you don’t have any kind of presence on these sites, you are missing out, so look to rectify this as soon as possible. Depending on your site, you may even be able to create some sort of a community which can help raise your profile even without any direct effort on your part.

  Tom Rhodes

About the Guest Author:

Tom Rhodes is currently planning a marketing strategy for a new website. He is looking into using www.designred.co.uk for the site design.