Not Using These 18 Steps to Generate FREE Traffic?

This is my version of an article named “10 Steps to Generate Free Targeted Web Traffic”, I have edited and update it to included new techniques and eliminate items that are no longer relevant.

Update with 8 more FREE traffic generating techniques.

This is a guide to help those on a budget and/or do not want to spend money on advertising, but still want to generate huge amounts of traffic. You now actually can have your cake and eat it too.

1.) Know Your Niche; this is a key to getting traffic to any website. You have to know more than the average person on the topics and items related to your industry.

2.) Keyword Research – This is the most overlooked step, but most important step. You need to do extensive keyword research. I use Google’s Keyword Tool that is free, but I also recommend using WordTracker. You need to find what are the most looked up keywords and phrases for your industry. It is OK to target the most competitive because if you build it right, you will be blowing your competitors away.

3.) Relative Keyword research - Be sure that you have included many relative keywords in your page’s Meta tags as well. This is a huge deal with the algorithms today. There is a difference between keyword stuffed and having relevant keywords. Relevant keywords help build PR (PageRank).

4.) Site Structure - keywords must be in your URL, that is the best way for Google and other search engines to see you and give you relevance. You will see many sites nowadays using dashes "-". This is the way search engines see a space and tells a word is being separated out. It helps in the site structure; for example http://www.test-site/testing-site-review.html. This structure is putting a very high relevance and ranking on test and site.

5.) Directory Listing - This is an age-old method that some have abandoned, but it still works. Remember, the objective here is to build traffic, so if you are serious, put your link in as many places as possible. By directory listing, you are getting one-way links back to your site, which is a great thing and improves your PR. Not your traffic, but PR is a way to get your site on Google’s top pages and therefore more traffic. Reciprocal links are not the best way, but if you are brand new, sometimes you have to do it. If you can, doing “one-ways” is much better. Search engines put a higher ranking on one-way links, so concentrate on those.

6.) Link Exchange - Again, reciprocal link is not as highly rated, but it is still very effective. You need to exchange links with as many websites as humanly possible and for best results make sure they are RELEVANT!!! What this means is it's not a good idea to have a recording studio site and have a lot of links exchanged with a food site. It is a good idea for a recording studio to be exchanged with other music related sites such as CD mastering, mp3s, other recording sites, etc... This shows a great deal of relevance with search engines. One key; do not name your links page "links.html" or anything of the sort...it's a dead give away to search engines and they do not appreciate it. Be creative; recording-studio-resources.html or something like that. Note, no more than 50 links on a page!!!

7.) Article Writing - This has proven, most recently to be a great method to produce traffic. The goal here is to get both one-way backlinks (on some sites) and traffic in an all-in-one step. Here's the key to writing good articles, you must spin every article your write. What this means is change the articles. Each article generates traffic too...that's the beauty.

8.) Article Submission – The key here, submit to directories every 2 days or so with your URL in the "Resource Box", not in the Body of the article. If you put your URL in the body, most articles directories will decline you.

9.) Forums, Blogging, etc. - Always be focused on finding new outlets to generate traffic. For example, forums are a big deal. Get on a schedule to constantly help others in forums, discussion boards, blogs, etc... This will prove you as an expert and in return people will trust you. To benefit from this, be sure to have your signature file included and don't spam the sites...this can only hurt you.

10.) Updating your Content - To keep the visitors coming back for more, you must constantly update your site and have unique content that you cannot get anywhere else (comes with knowing your niche, section 1). This keeps the visitors coming back for more and will get your site linked to by others because of your content. Earned backlinks!!! Free backlinks!!!

11) RSS Feeds - Create an RSS Feed of your website, and make sure to update it when your website is updated. You can use resources like Feedburner to create RSS feeds. Place your RSS feed in the header using the tag.



This will allow your website's RSS feed gain traction from robots surfing the internet for RSS feeds, and will create a snowball effect of growing backlinks.

12) RSS Feed Submission - Submit your RSS feed(s) to as many RSS feed(s) directories as possible. Search Google for "RSS Feed Submission", and other related keyword phrases, and submit your feed to those sites. I would attempt to submit to 25 or more for 30 days straight. It will help gain your RSS feed more exposure, which in return will gain you more backlinks and increase your traffic. The important thing to remember is to always have your feed updated!

13) Ping Blog Pinging Sites like Google Blog, Ping-O-Matic.com, Goat-O-Matic.com, and others every time you update your RSS feed. They have automated ways of sending pings to them with each update. If you are not a programmer, you may need some assistance with creating an automated pinging program and setting up a cron job (This is an application on Linux/Unix system that automatically runs a script/command/program for you at a given specified time).

14) Create a news / press release section on your website, where visitors can go to see new things. Have it updating regularly, and create an RSS feed of that section, and repeat the previous RSS feed methods mentioned to increase exposure for the feed.

15) RSS aggregate Industry news feeds onto your site, and submit them to RSS feeds submission sites as well. To RSS aggregate means you will gather as many RSS feeds of your industry's top plays, or news outlets, and create one super RSS feed from it. Then place the RSS feed display in the news section, and/or a ticker on your site. Make sure it is readable by the spiders, since this will create the effect of you becoming an industry portal or trusted source. The spiders will see new information on your and use your site to navigate to other sites; which in return will result in your site becoming an authority site, and increasing the traffic that is sent to your site by the search engines.

16) Create Videos of things pertaining to your industry; for example a Video Tutorial on "Page Rank", and explaining if you are in the internet marketing field. Post the video on Youtube, Metacafe, and as many video sites as possible, and on your site. Make sure you have links in the description of the video to your site, and place a watermark or the whole URL of your site inside the video; preferably at the beginning and end of the video. This alone can increase your site's traffic by 500%. On one site I have, Youtube sends me between 500 to 1000 new visitors a day!

17) Web 2.0 Bookmarking – Submit ALL your web pages to sites like Del.icio.us, digg.com, stumbleupon.com, reddit.com, furl.net, technorati.com, and others if you can find them. This is the "web 2.0" traffic that everyone is going gaga over, and there is a reason why. The amount of traffic that is generated from these sites has been known to take servers completely offline. You can easily receive 10,000 to 100,000 visitors in 1 day just from one of your pages being on the top of these sites. The key is to submit as many as possible, and concentrate on creating interesting content that people will love.

18.) Repeat, Repeat, and did I say Repeat!!! The whole key is to be consistent and persistently update your site. NEVER GIVE UP!!!