Top 3 Website Traffic Methods – An Overview

Driving traffic to your website is essential if your ultimate goal is to create revenue via sales. Having the capacity to drive large amounts of traffic to your website is critical if your ultimate goal is to make money online.

My personal top 3 website traffic methods are merely a starting point. There are a variety of strategies you can begin to implement which will help aid you to drive massive traffic to your intended website pages.  These are my top three, but many others should also be employed for a truly effective and balanced approach. The search engines love to see balance, although emphasis can, of course, be placed on which ever method proves itself more fruitful.

My Top 3 Website Traffic Methods

1. Social Media

Social media platforms provide you with the kind of access to customers that would be unimaginable only a few short years ago. They are what make viral marketing possible. By maximizing the benefits of social media, you can promote your brand, product or business exponentially, rather than laterally, creating a network of customers who can then continue to promote your business for you.

Most Important Social Media Platforms

The most important social media platforms are the ones that are going to get your message out to the broadest possible audience the most quickly. These can vary based on your niche and also can change based on a variety of factors, including the whims of the public, introduction of new platforms with improved technology and applications, and successful marketing.

For example, just a few years ago, MySpace was one of the most popular social media platforms on the internet. Today, almost nobody uses it anymore.

The most important social media platforms that you need to be involved in if you want to launch a successful viral marketing campaign today are:

1. YouTube – Video is the preferred format for internet users, especially since nearly everyone has access to streaming video on their smart phones and tablets thanks to WiFi. This Google-owned website is the biggest and most significant distributor of video on the web and it’s impossible to talk about viral marketing without talking about YouTube.
2. Facebook – Despite its recent struggles on Wall Street, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform on the web. It has always benefited by its brilliant ease of use and improvements in the site’s ability to share video and other formats. Many recent improvements are only going to make it more popular. Did you check your Facebook page today? I thought so!
3. Twitter – Web users – especially younger people — can’t get enough of this site. Users share brief “tweets” about what they are doing and the things they like. The primary benefit is the ability to share links that can take users to other web pages.
4. LinkedIn – Focused more on business networking rather than social networking, LinkedIn continues to be an important platform for reaching corporate and commercial targets.  Marketing on LinkedIn effectively can easily explode your sales.
5. Pinterest – This site currently holds the title as the most popular social preference platform. Visitors post links to things they like. If that includes one of your links, you can go viral very easily.
6. Google Plus – Although it stumbled coming out of the gate, the wide variety of killer apps and features eventually are going to make this comprehensive social networking platform the most important in the marketplace. Believe it or not, Google Plus now ranks #2 on the Net.

2. PPC

If you have capital to invest and are truly driven in bringing more people to your page, it may be wise to invest in PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.

There are many huge benefits to PPC traffic over other methods.

First, the traffic you receive from pay per click advertising is targeted. This means that everyone who visits your website through pay per click ads is interested in your products or services. With other types of internet marketing strategies, there are no guarantees about the type of traffic you are generating for your website.

Second, pay per click marketing is affordable and budget friendly. In most cases, you can set monthly spending limits on your account. Since you only pay for clicks to your site, you will also find that you spend less money on advertising as a whole. With pay per click advertising, you are not spending a lot of money for ads that may or may not generate traffic.

Finally, pay per click advertising is a wide open, if competitive, market. You have unlimited potential for advertising, and in some cases can dominate a market through the purchase of keywords.

3. SEO

Search engines are one of the primary determiners of the success or failure of your business. Master the search engine algorithm, and you can keep your web pages at the top of the product searches for your niche indefinitely.

Unfortunately, mastering the Google and Bing search engines is nearly impossible because the algorithms – the formulas used to determine website “weight” and ranking – are changing constantly

Google and Bing, the two biggest search engines on the internet, use “spiders” to crawl through the web and find new websites and pages. The search engines then use their ever-changing algorithms to assess the content of the web page or website, index it and assign it a rank. These spiders then move on to other websites through links and the process continues on and on forever.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is what web page designers and website writers do to make their website more appealing to the search engines. The more appealing the site is to the search engine, the higher it will be ranked on its niche search. If the website is ranked on the front page of the search – or even better, the top spot – then most users are far more likely to click on that website than any of the ones on any of the other pages.

For websites that promote products or services, this can mean the difference between success and failure. The primary objective of any business’s website is to get ranked in the number one position in their search niche, or at the very least on the front page. If you are not on page 1, you might as well close up shop because less than 11 percent of all internet users ever go past page 1. In most cases, they won’t even go down the first few results on the first page. That makes it critical for your website to land on the first page.

If a page has any hope of going viral, it has to be listed on page 1 or 2. It’s as simple as that. On-page and off-page SEO techniques are one way to ensure that your web pages are ranked high.

Examples of on-page SEO are including the best keywords for your product niche on your web pages, especially in strategic places such as the title, headline, sub heads, and first and final paragraphs of copy. Keyword saturation, or repeating your keyword so that it represents 2% to 3% of the total words on your web page, also is an effective on-page SEO technique.

Off-page SEO methods would be things like creating a large number of backlinks to your web page from sites the search engines consider to be “authoritative.” When expert sites reference you web page, this tells the search engines that what you have to say is important, and it consequently will rank your page higher.

Outsmarting the Penguin

Google and Bing are the two largest search engines on the internet. Marketers have spent years trying to figure out the best ways to outsmart these search engines’ algorithms using non-organic methods to get their web pages listed at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for their niches. Aware of this, Google frequently changes its algorithm to prevent this type of fraud.

According to Google’s official blog, Panda and Penguin, the second major algorithm update which rolled out in May 2012, were intended to reduce web spam and weed out sites that were trying to undermine Google’s quality guidelines, including those that were “over-optimized” and that used black hat SEO strategies to drive traffic to their pages.

The Penguin update gave additional weight to social signals given by the people who use social media the most. It also takes into consideration which users have the largest groups of followers and friends and who are considered to be experts in their fields; assigning even more influence to their recommendations.

That means that instead of focusing exclusively on SEO, internet marketers are more likely to have their pages ranked higher if they have more social signals such as Facebook “Likes”, re-Tweets, Google Plus “+1’s” and the like. This also facilitates going viral.

Top 3 Website Traffic Methods in Perspective

As stated previously social networking is paramount to the success of any new start up. The web can be used as a vital tool to help aid your success. These top 3 website traffic methods have proven themselves time and time again and  can be done easily if you’re willing to invest your time into implementing the various mechanisms and strategies listed above.