When traffic's a good thing

If you've invested a lot of time and money creating an awesome website for your business you really want people to find and use it. Driving traffic to your personal blog or website is key to building a larger audience, gaining new customers, and going viral. Everyone can benefit from learning about driving traffic to their site!

Putting a strategy in place that optimises your website for organic traffic from search engine results is your best bet for guaranteeing the increase of traffic to your site. Below are 5 simple and easy tips for doing this.

1.Work out your SEO Strategy

So the first step is to actually sit down and create (and then implement) your SEO strategy. This often stresses people out because they consider it to be an immediately time-consuming task that only shows results in the long term. In reality, this isn't the case. Once you understand the basics of building your SEO strategy, you'll be well on your way. New to SEO and how to utilise it on your site? There are literally hundreds of websites that offer self-help like moz.com/learn/seo

2. Don't make SEO complicated

People often associate SEO and SEM with words like time-consuming, complicated, and long-term, but in reality SEO is much simpler than you might think. SEO is a combination of two factors: on-site content and off-site link backs. That means that your website content should be SEO friendly, with titles and headers that incorporate popular search terms so people can find your content, and you should get as many reputable websites as possible to link back and reference your site so your search ranking improves. Really there's not much more to it than that.

3. Content is still king, baby

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to create valuable and interesting content that is highly 'shareable' and relevant to a large group of people. Of paramount importance is having a clear and concise title for your blog or article. You want it to be so compelling that people cannot help themselves but click the link to view your content. You need that little one-liner to convey all the information about the content of the page while being seductive enough to get people to actually click on it. At the same time you don't want to just create a title that gets people to click on the link, but has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the page.

This is where keywords come into play. You could try using a keyword analysis tool like Google's Keywords Tool to find out which terms related to your industry are the most highly searched for on the web. From there you can list the relevant terms that relate to the content of your post, helping you to craft an interesting title that incorporates highly searched for keywords. Then, when someone is looking for an article on your subject, they'll be able to find it.

And once they've clicked your seductively worded title and landed on your page, the content should excite (or at least amuse!) them so much that they have an intense desire to share your awesomely amazing content with the rest of the world! (see next point)

4. Optimise haring tools and utilize social media

Social Media is a great way of getting your name out there and helping people discover your posts and products. RSS feeds, social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and blogging can all be considered a part of social media. Utilizing many of these outlets and channels can help you reach a larger audience and help promote your content when users share and distribute your content.

It's best practice to make it as easy as possible for people to share the content on your site. Have "buttons" or links to help people who come to your site drive even more traffic to your site, by sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, and other channels.

Also check out: StumbleUpon, Chime.in, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Newsvine and Pinterest!

5. Build symbiotic relationships with influential people

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to target influencers in a particular industry to try and get them to help you increase your audience. The best way to do this is to form a mutually beneficial relationship with influencers, by sharing their posts and content, or advertising for them on your site. You want to create a relationship that will make both of you happy.

Advertise: Offer specials in advertising on your site or free advertising if other sites feature you.

Social Broadcasting: If you have a large Twitter or Facebook following, offer to Tweet about other's websites or posts. In return they can do the same for you.

(Email me for some resources if you're still having trouble crafting a catchy title to highlight the awesome content of your post, or if you can't figure out what to write about in the first place to drive traffic to your site.)