How to Increase Traffic to Your Website.

Going by the recent figures, online shopping is taking the world by storm and more and more people are taking the online route to create and build brand awareness and improve their sales.

To run a successful ecommerce business, you must first have a website. That itself is simple enough. Hire any web designing company, and you will soon have your website up and running. But now comes the difficult part. There are millions of sites registered on the Internet and a huge number are being registered everyday across the globe. So how to make your presence felt in the infinite space that is the Internet?

Ask the people and they will say getting targeted traffic to your website is the most difficult part, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of ways that people can reach your website, mostly from search engines – but the question is how do you stand out in the crowd?

To answer this question, first understand that people can reach your website through any of the following methods:

• From search engine traffic
• Articles in Ezine sites
• Forums

So what should you do to get your web site noticed by people? You can attract traffic to your website by paid or free methods. In this article, I am focussing on the free methods. When I say free it simply means you don't have to pay for the methods but you definitely have to put in time. Free methods require patience but do bear fruit in the long run.

Writing articles in ezines is one-way free method to ensure that your website is ranked high in the search engine results. To write articles, you must first do some groundwork. This means that you should identify the topics to write on. Needless to say, these topics should relate to your website and that you should weave in as many keywords as possible. Keywords mean the words or phrases that people generally enter in the search engine when they are looking for a particular product or service. For example, your website may be an online store selling baseball bats. So you should write articles pertaining to baseball bats. However, it is important to point out that these keywords should be seamlessly woven into the content so the quality of the article is not compromised. Ultimately the article should make sense and provide some useful information to the end user.

So how does article marketing work? Well first of all these article submission sites have what you can call a signature file, which allows you to give a brief bio about yourself and your company as also the link to your website.

You can also use a text link with keywords pointing to your website. The purpose is to get you some back links. In fact back links are the main object of article marketing. These links are aimed at increasing your SEO initiatives and get you more targeted traffic.

Then there are other free methods of generating traffic to your website. For example you can get gain traffic by writing comments in other people's forums and blogs. In fact, a lot blogs actually invite you to enter your comments that relate to the subject of your blog post. When you do enter a comment, make sure you include a link to your website. Most bloggers understand this as a friendly 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours'. Posting a comment is a way to pay you back for posting an intelligent response in the blog. A word of advice here, your comment should be a thought provoking response to the topic and not just a simple, 'hey this is a good post.'

If you don't have a blog, then start one immediately. Blogging is another way to get free traffic if you can keep writing interesting content every few days. Search the net and you will come across many sites such as Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, and many more. So get creative and start making a blog entry every day. Of course, put as many links in each blog using keywords that are relevant to your site to generate traffic.

Then there are free sites like Webon.com, Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, and others that allow you to setup a free website and put in some content with text links. These will help you generate back links, which will lead to more traffic.