The Basics On Traffic

There is one constant in successful websites, traffic. Without it you can’t stay in business on the Internet. With that being said, how do you get traffic to your home business website? This is particularly important for those of us who don’t have a lot of money to spend, which is just about all of us right now.

There are several ways to build traffic to your website, however none of them will happen overnight. The first is:

Organic Search Engine Traffic: This kind of traffic comes from, you guessed it, search engines. These would be Google, Yahoo, MSN Bing or Live and hundreds of niche related search engines. It’s not enough to be indexed in a search engine, because indexing is the process by which the search engines actually know that your site exists. It doesn’t mean that your website will appear when someone types in a word or phrase into the search engines search bar.

In order to come up within a search for a specific word or phrase your site needs to be ranked for that word or search phrase. These are called keywords or keyword phrases. In order to be ranked and appear in the search results the search engines use algorithms or statistical models to rank your site. So for example if your business is about mountain bikes, your primary keyword phrase will be "mountain bikes." This phrase will appear throughout your website in a number of different places such as your META tag keywords, your META tag Description and within content throughout your website. This article is about traffic so if you want additional information on Search Engine Optimization you can go to that section of this site at:

Article Writing is another way to get traffic to your site. Using the example above you may want to write articles about mountain bike riding or mountain bikes or any other number of related topics. The concept here is very simple. You write articles about your website’s main topic and distribute them to article directories on the Internet. By inserting a link back to your website, in the article directory’s information box, anyone that reads the article and clicks on your site’s url is traffic to your website. The more articles you write the more potential clicks back to your site. Additionally the more Article Directories you submit to the more potential clicks to your website. An additional feature is the "backlink" to your website. This will give you additional points from the search engines for your ranking.

Text Links: Text links are very effective but you must be careful on how they are used. A text link is a link back to your site from another site. Sometimes it is just your site’s name and sometimes it could be from a descriptive text link. An example of this is something such as your site and domain name link as "Bob’s Mountain Bikes" or a descriptive link such as "18 Speed Mountain Bikes" each would have your site’s url however the second example would have a specific keyword that you are trying to get ranked on by the search engines. (There is an interesting service that can provide paid text links back to your site, . As I said they are a fee based resource however there are some very cost effective sites to link to.)

These are three free basic ways to get traffic, however traffic generation is a sophisticated business and requires a lot of work and research. See our sections on SEO an Pay Per Click for additional information as well as other related beginner categories here.