Driving Traffic - Where to Start - Guest Post Saturday #4

It's Saturday and you know what that means! It's Guest Post time! Someone will be here to do a guest post each and every Saturday to share something fun and exciting with you. After reading this, it would be great if you could stop by their blog and show a little love.

Do you have something you'd like to share with my readers? Feel free to contact me for future guest post opportunities by clicking the Email Me banner at the top of the page.

This week's guest post is from Stacey and she's got some great tips to share on driving traffic to your site. She'll be back in a couple of weeks to share tips on keeping the traffic too, so make sure you stop back to look for it!

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This is a guest contribution by Stacey Cavanagh, who works in Online Marketing in the UK, for Tecmark: SEO London

A successful website or blog depends upon so many factors. There’s the niche and making sure it’s a relevant one, there’s the content quality and then there’s of course, traffic and community. The latter can be particularly tricky. Of all the sites in the world, how would people find yours and why would they return after visiting once?

With that question in mind, traffic generation can really be broken down into two main areas: Getting traffic and keeping it. This post deals with getting traffic to your site and I’ll talk in a further article about keeping it!

Basic SEO

Even if you don’t intend to embark on an ongoing full SEO campaign, optimising your site makes good sense. Bear in mind that search engines use bots to find sites and these bots are programmed to work out what a site is about by its content. So while catchy titles for blog posts are a great way to grab attention, you should make sure meta page titles and descriptions contain keywords relevant to your topic. If you’re running in Wordpress, there’s a free plugin known as the SEO All-in-One pack. What this does, is allows you to set the meta title and description for your blog and for each individual post too. This means your blog post title can be something catchy and attention grabbing and your meta title can easily be made something different, to take into account search engine optimisation.

In terms of SEO, it’s also worth making sure your content contains keywords relevant to your topic area (though don’t force them in – your articles should read naturally).

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Bebo... they’re more than quirky names! Social media is massive and growing and is an excellent way to network with others in a similar niche to yourself. The traffic generation potential, particularly with Twitter is immense.

However, there is a common misconception that it’s simply a case of “sign up and the followers will come.” Not so much! It’s more like, “Sign up, spend a good few hours perusing and looking for people in a similar niche. Study what they are doing and follow others in a similar area. Begin to correspond and network and post relevant, high quality information or entertainment snippets and then, maybe, the followers will come.” It does require a time investment but it is well worth it. Making sure you’re following people interested in the topic area of your site is one way to ensure your followers have a good chance of then turning into traffic for your site. And don’t only plug your own links through Twitter! Share posts and links from other people too.

Blog Networking

Whatever your niche is, yours certainly will not be the only blog or site in that area. And while it might seem a little like liaising with the enemy, networking with these other bloggers is essential. Do so through commenting on their posts with insightful and worthwhile comments. You could even offer to guest post on their blog or invite them to your guest on yours (or both)! Having a guest poster on your site offers a fresh perspective from time to time and posting on someone else’s blog means you are exposed to a whole new audience who, in turn, may well visit your site!

This is just the tip of the ice berg in terms of traffic generation potential. The Internet opens so many doors when it comes to networking globally. The most important thing is to keep your approaches fresh. Don’t be afraid of spying a contact making opportunity and seizing on it. Raise your profile online and the traffic will come...

As for keeping the traffic returning? Well that’s a whole other post...