Alright, so you have a website but are lacking visitors? This article will discuss in detail the different ways to generate traffic for your site. Keep in mind that the simplest, yet most foolproof and trustworthy way of gaining targeted visitors to your site, is through your site's content. No matter how many traffic generating programs you use, or how many affiliates you obtain, your site will never become popular if it does not have clear, unique content. This article will split up the art of traffic generating into three different categories: lite, medium, and advanced. With each new level of promotion comes more traffic to your site, but also more expense (or time involved). If you are just starting out, we recommend sticking to the lite version.

Lite
This is best for personal pages that do not have products to sell, but are looking for traffic and visitors. Most traffic generating software is designed for people who will be selling products, so some unconventionalities will have to be made to get the traffic you desire.

Search Engine Optimization
If you have browsed other website articles on promotion, you are tired of hearing this. However, search engine optimization is probably the biggest step in creating a successful and visited website. If done correctly, search engines such as Google can account for over 70% of your overall traffic. If you are looking for inexpensive free search engine activity, we recommend addme to submit your sites. Also, if your site has cpanel enabled it has a default module to submit your site to the biggest search engines. However, keep in mind that if you submit your site to a search engine too many times repeatedly in a set period of time, search engines can block your site and not index you! Also remember that there are certain rules you must follow when creating sites you want to be indexed. If your site does not follow these rules, you may be labeled a link farm, or blacklisted from search engine spiders.

Meta Tags and Keywords
Not the ultimate source of traffic like they once were, meta tags are still used frequently to determine your site's indexing on some search engines. We definitely recommend setting up your site's meta tags correctly in order for you to be indexed properly. We have provided an example of a site's meta tags. Simply change the settings to optimize it for your site.

Spreading the Word
The most logical and one of the best ways to ensure targeted visitors to your site is through word of mouth. This means that people with interests relating to your site are being told to go to your site by you, or your other site members. This probably will not reach massive amounts of traffic, just because you can only tell so many people about your site. However, users who visit your site and want to visit your site are more likely to visit it repeatedly than users who are forced to view your site (link exchanges). We have an example list of good places to spread the word about your site.

* Related Forums (simply provide a link to your site in your signature)
 

* Chat Networks such as AIM or MSN
 

* Advertising Sitesv

* Friends and Family

Medium
If you have already done everything in the lite version, then the medium traffic promotion section is just for you. All of these are free programs that can be used to generate traffic for your website. For a complete review of all these programs, visit this article.

Manual Surf Exchanges
These are traffic exchanges where you view other members sites and then click to view a new site after a certain time period has been fulfilled. In return, your site is put into the site rotation and is viewed by other members. These are useful for getting visits to your site, but visitors are usually not targeted, and are just viewing sites to get visits to their own site. The concept is very nice, but the truth is you will not get lasting members from this traffic promotional tool in itself. If you have a new site that has just started out, though, this is a great way to generate a bit of traffic for free. Note: Most of these exchanges have paid membership as well, usually with bigger bonuses. Visit the VisualStyles.com traffic exchange

Auto Surf Exchanges
Very similar to manul surf exchanges, auto surf exchanges work in the same way, except you don't have to click anything to cycle through sites. Websites are automatically displayed for you. This means it is a lot easier and faster to gain credits and views to your site, but it also means that people might not be visiting your site, they are just leaving their window open and letting the surf exchange take care of it. This kind of surfing is not recommended for traffic purposes!

Pop Up Exchanges
These are very similar to surfing exchanges, except you as a user do nothing to gain credits for your site. Usually, you place a small code onto your site and everytime a user views your webpage a pop up appears of another site belonging to a user in the exchange. This is one of the best ways to promote your site, however it requires that you put pop ups on your page! Some users will be automatically turned off by the fact that your website has pop ups. If you are going to use a pop up exchange program, we recommend Trafic Zap.

Advanced
Most of these advertising solutions involve paying money to get your site a lot of traffic. If you are serious about getting traffic, or you own a product that you would like to advertise, these solutions are perfect for you.

Buying Traffic / Credits
If you belong to traffic exchanges you can usually buy impressions or traffic for your site. If you do not have the time to surf through different sites and 'waste' your time, you can simply purchase impressions to your website. With prices ranging from $5 to $50 and impressions ranging from 1,000 to 50,000 we recommend this solution only if you are happy with the exchange you are purchasing from. It is true that you will receive all these credits eventually, so you should be cautious when purchasing page views. Depending on how you want visitors to come to your site, you should choose to buy credits from an exchange with many or few members. With an exchange with few members, your credits will be slow to be used up, but it will ensure that your site gets viewed everyday for a long period of time. With an exchange with a lot of members your credits will be used up fast, but your site will have a sudden explosion of traffic. Research what type of credits or site views you should buy before committing to anything!

Purchasing Content
If your website lacks content, or you want extra incentives for people to view your site, you can always purchase reseller rights to different scripts or templates. This enables you to instantly have sources of content which you could resell to future customers. We do not recommend this for new sites, simply because it will be hard to generate a lot of sales!

Installing Your Own Exchange
Installing your own type of traffic or link exchange on your website can prove to be very profitable. You will literally receive massive online time for members using your search feature, and you will also receive a steady flow of income from members upgrading their accounts to a paid version. However, exchange scripts can be tricky to make, and very expensive to buy. If you have time and money to invest into this system it is a very good idea to get it once your website is settled down.

Summary
There are a lot of ways to generate traffic to your site, some more successful than others. Different advertising and promotion ideas will work for different people and different websites. Almost all of the time you get what you pay for! If you invest very little time and money into your website, you will receive very little in return. Good websites take hundreds of hours to create and maintain. The best advice you can ever receive is to be unique and different. If you have unique and exclusive content, your site will succeed!

Article by VisionStyles
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