Google Advertising Tools

Chapter 2. Driving Traffic to Your Site

They say (whoever “they” are) that the best things in life are free. That’s certainly true when it comes to driving traffic to your web site.

You can spend a great deal of money to send traffic to your site using advertising. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use Google’s AdWords program, explained in detail in Part III of this book. But there are also many no-cost ways to draw site visitors, many of which may be more effective, and get traffic that is more highly targeted, than using paid advertising. Even if you are using paid advertising to draw traffic, you should know about free techniques—and you should use these techniques in conjunction with your advertising.

Tip

I’ll explain how to optimize your web site and pages to get more traffic from Google and other search engines in Chapter 3.

This chapter explains how to publicize your site and increase traffic using techniques that do not cost money and do not involve tinkering with the HTML code and content of your pages themselves. In other words, this chapter explains how to drive traffic to your site using external mechanisms, such as submitting your site to a search engine, leaving more complex issues of constructing your site so that search engines will like it—a field sometimes called search engine optimization (SEO)—for Chapter 3.

Creating a Plan and a Story

Many of the steps I suggest in this chapter for publicizing your site are essentially mechanical, for example, submitting ...