Chapter 3. Driving Traffic to a Website

The best way to get traffic to a website is to publish great content, sit back, and let word of mouth spread the news. However, life is not always quite so simple. For one thing, generating great content is not necessarily easy. And even great content can sometimes use a head start so that it can really catch on.

Effective online strategies for driving traffic to a site fall into three general categories:

Promotional

Intended to build buzz and word of mouth

Technical

SEO activities intended to increase search engine visibility and rankings and drive traffic via inbound links

Advertising

Such as the Google AdWords program explained in Part III of this book

The first two of these strategies fall under the general rubric of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), whereas advertising with AdWords (explained in detail in Part III) is, of course, SEM (Search Engine Marketing). I discussed crafting a campaign balance between SEO and SEM in Chapter 2.

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 or content of your pages themselves.

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