Receiving a large amount of traffic is the key to running a successful website. When most people think about website traffic, they instantly think of search engines. While it is true that search engines can provide a large amount of daily traffic to a website, there are many other traffic sources available to webmasters that can provide a spike in daily visitors. Harnessing these alternative traffic sources is a good way to protect your website against a search engine algorithm penalty, especially if your business relies on your website to produce revenue.
Without a diverse assortment of traffic sources, your website will struggle to gain page views if it does not have a presence in the search engine rankings. Here are a few alternative traffic sources you can leverage to help increase the number people who visit your website daily.
Social Media
Social media websites are some of the best traffic referral sources on the Internet. If you are able to get a lot of people to share your website with their friends via their social media accounts, you can drive a substantial amount of traffic to your website. Sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are some of the most popular sites on the Internet. With so many people logging into their social media accounts on a daily basis, this is a traffic source that cannot be ignored.
Guest Posting
Another excellent way to drive traffic to your website through an alternative method is guest posting on other blogs. When you write a guest post for another blog, you can place a backlink to your site in the post and anyone who likes the blog post you have written will click on the link to visit your site. Target blogs specific to your industry that receives a lot of traffic can greatly increase your own website’s traffic.
When attempting to guest post in order to increase your site’s traffic, it is important that you produce the highest quality of content possible. Not only will this increase your chances of having your guest post accepted by the blog owner but anyone reading the post will be more inclined to click on your link and visit your website when your content is of high quality.
Email Marketing
Creating an email list and periodically emailing your list to alert them of new content posted on your site is a great way to increase your site’s traffic. Email lists are a wonderful way to capture repeat visitors to your website and build a fan base. Through your email messages you can keep your email list updated on the latest happenings of your website and encourage them to visit your site every so often.
YouTube
Much like social media, YouTube can be a great source of traffic for any website. YouTube is one of the largest search engines on the Internet and receives millions of visitors each and every day. Creating a video that is related to your website or a topic specific to your industry is a creative way to capture the attention of Internet users and drive traffic to your site. Just make sure you include a link in the description of your video and prompt your viewers to click on the link to visit your website.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Sharing your best content on social bookmarking websites such as Digg or StumbleUpon can increase the amount of traffic your website receives. People enjoy sharing content they find interesting with the rest of the world through these websites. If one of your blog posts goes viral on one of these social bookmarking sites, you can see a dramatic spike in traffic to your website.
While search engines such as Google and Bing can provide a large number of targeted visitors to your website on a daily basis, they are not the only source of traffic on the Internet. Connecting through social media websites, posting videos to YouTube, and using email marketing techniques are all ways you can drive traffic to your website without having to rely on the most popular search engines.
Jeff is an SEO expert and content contributor at http://www.npromote.com/. Among other optmization methods, one of the things he is trying to do is to get all the possible traffic he can, from many different sources.
