Almost everyone who puts up a website wants to get lots of traffic to it. How to get that traffic to the website can be a challenge. Doing it in a cost effective way is even more difficult. Let's explore a couple of ways you can start increasing your web site traffic.

Writing articles gives you a piece of the search engine pie

My primary business is focused on web hosting and web design. In order to drive qualified traffic to my website, I have focused most of my article writing towards topics of interest to people who are looking for both my main services.

By writing articles focused on the thousands of topics found in these two main topics, I greatly increase the chance that search engines will reward my efforts with free, quality traffic.

What are keywords?

At its simplest, keywords are all the text words that appear on a web page. Because many words are very common though, many are excluded from search engine searches. Prepositions like 'the', 'a', 'of', etc... are usually excluded because searching for them alone would most likely return every english document in a search engine. So meaningful keywords are anything that help describe the content on the web page.

Content is Still King

Some sales copywriters on the internet are trying to tell people that content doesn't matter. All that matters is a good sales letter. What they usually don't tell you though, is that they are describing only one kind of model to make money online. In many ways, trying to make money through a sales letter is more difficult than creating good content due to the free traffic you can get through search engines.

Content drives the traffic you get from search engines. Search engines are the number one source for quality free traffic. Targeting the right keywords will mean the difference between excellent traffic and mediocre traffic. By writing quality articles focused on key topics, your website can get ranked highly on specific keywords you are targeting. Over time, this will result in a flood of qualified, free traffic.

How to Target Your Content

When writing web page content, avoid trying to focus on too many keywords. You can only hope to optimize one web page for three of four keywords with one main keyword being your primary focus. Writing a web page that is focused on one key topic will result in far more success that one that tries to focus on multiple topics at once. If your topic does have a number of sub topics, breaking them up into separate pages would be a smart idea. Search engines love deep sites with lots of content and hundreds of pages.

“But I'm Not a Writer! I don't have anything to write about!”

Don't sell yourself short. You know a lot about a number of topics that would be of help to others. Write a list of all the topics you could write about. Once you have a list written, choose the topic you feel would be the easiest for you to write about. Start writing. The beauty of the internet is that anyone can publish their own content for next to nothing. As long as you focus on providing people with useful information, your visitors will appreciate it. Best of all, search engines will appreciate it and reward you with high rankings.

Is there more to it than that? Of course, but only one topic at a time please ;-)

To increase web site traffic, focus on quality AND quantity of content.