“More hits, I need more hits!” Now who with an Internet business has not said this phrase? More traffic is what everyone strives for because in our minds it equates to more sales. This may or may not be true. It is one thing to bring more visitors to your website and quite another to convert them to sales. If your website has poor design, navigation and other usability factors, then most likely more hits will not convert into sales.

Okay, so you have a well-designed site and have done usability testing to make sure visitors stay on the site and now all you need is to get people to come to the website. How do you do it?

There are lots of ways to bring more hits to a website. Let’s talk about the ethical, non-spammy, non-irritating methods and leave the others behind. First, you need to optimize the website for the search engines. In the long run, this will bring the most traffic of any other method. You can either devote the time to education and a steep learning curve and then optimize the site yourself or you can find an SEO firm (like us) that will do this for you. The ROI of SEO is far superior, in the long run, to any other online advertising method. But what if you need quicker results?

I Need More Hits, Now!

Suppose you can’t wait the months it takes for SEO to fully kick in? Suppose you’re a merchant who needs to hit the ground running and needs to generate immediate business? There are several methods you can use to jump-start your online business quickly. Pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-inclusion (PPI) are two of these methods. In order to get more visitors now, on the pay-per-click side, a couple of the most popular programs are Microsoft Adcenter and Google AdWords. With these programs, you can bid against others for popular keywords relevant to your site, and the listing will appeared in the Sponsored Listing sections of these search engines. The more you pay, the higher the rankings and the more hits you receive.

Pay-per-inclusion is different because you pay only to have a website included in a directory or search engine. For businesses, a couple important places to be are the Yahoo directory and Business.com directory (B2B only). With Yahoo, you pay per year and will appear within the directory structure. No guarantee of visitors are included with this plan, though (Update – Yahoo has stopped offering this service). With Business.com, being included is relatively inexpensive, and like Yahoo, may give your site a boost in the search engine rankings, but it also has a pay-per-click component to it, where for a certain amount per click, a site gets better placement and more hits.

I’m Getting More Hits But No One Is Buying!

If you’re getting more visitors to your site but no one is buying it could be due to a couple of different factors. Web usability is the first issue. Check your server log files and use a traffic analysis application to determine what page your visitors are landing upon, and how they are moving through the website. If your visitors are primarily landing and leaving, this could be because they have found no content of value to them, the page was slow to load so they left, they were frustrated finding what they needed right away so they left or several other factors. Web usability is an art and science all of its own and is too big on an issue to go into detail about here.

The second issue is that perhaps you’ve picked the wrong keywords to build the page around. Analysis from the major search engines has shown that there are two types of visitors: information seekers and buyers. If you pick a keyword that will bring in primarily information seekers, and try to convert them to buyers, then you have a difficult task ahead of you. The reverse is also true. If you pick a keyword of interest to buyers, but only give them information, then they get frustrated and leave. An example might be “continuing education” versus “online education.” If you build a website around continuing education then you may be visited primarily by information seekers for offline services with low convertibility into online sales. If, however, you chose online education you would most likely attract those who would be willing to sign up for services right now.

I Need More Hits From Other Channels!

Okay, I’m already using PPC, PPI and SEO and I love the results but I want more. What do I do? There’s lots you can do to gain more hits. If you have a big budget, you can do radio, TV and magazine advertisement. If you’re a smaller operation you can use some guerrilla marketing techniques that are low or no-cost. Advertise on other websites, in newsletters, send out press releases, give away something of value that people want, get interviewed by the local newspaper and by the local radio stations, be an advocate for your business with all your friends, acquaintances, relatives. If you want more traffic, send in letters to the editor and mention the website. Start a free newsletter, hold a contest, and do something wacky as a public relations stunt (nothing dangerous, just wacky). Any publicity is good publicity so be creative. You have more control than you know in receiving more business, so seize all of your opportunities.

Website traffic is the number one imperative of 99-percent of the marketers on the Internet. How does one go about gaining more website traffic? That question is putting the cart before the horse. The first thing a person needs to do is measure current website traffic before embarking on gaining more visitors. The second step is to use some or all of the methods listed below to gain more targeted website users and the third step is to measure current visitors once again in order to calculate the success of the traffic-building campaign.

Measuring Website Traffic

You may know where you want to go, but how do you get there if you don’t know where you’re starting from? By measuring current website traffic, you’ll establish a baseline of how many unique visitors you’re currently receiving and where they’re coming from.

If someone else is hosting your site, most likely they’ll have a traffic analysis package that you can access through the control panel. Packages such as Webalizer or AWStats are common. Even if one of these website traffic analysis applications is not offered by your host, most likely you’ll still have access to the log files and can download these to a PC and use an application such as Funny Web Analyzer to give out the necessary stats. Of course, if you have control of your website, then Google Analytics is a must.

If these website traffic analysis packages are not available or understandable, you may wish to turn to an outside vendor who will give you a little Java code to put on the pages in order to give the necessary stats. Vendors like web-stats.com or freestats.com are a couple of places to start.

Once you have an idea of how many visitors per day you’re receiving and where they’re coming from it is time to start using some methods to gain website traffic.

Gaining Website Traffic

The top method with the highest return on investment of gaining website traffic is to perform search engine optimization (SEO). Traffic from the natural search engine rankings such as Google is free and for some online businesses, this accounts for 80-percent of their sales. Spending a couple of thousand dollars on SEO may seem like a lot of money. But if your site has, say, 10 pages in the top rankings of the search engines (SE’s), do you think the resulting traffic will make this money back? If the answer is no, then you may not wish to do SEO. But if the answer is yes, which is most often the case, then you’ll not only recoup the investment but most likely gain thousands of dollars more in sales on your site. Isn’t this what you’re going for in the first place?

Since SEO is a long-term plan for gaining traffic, typically taking weeks or months for the rankings to fully kick in, many site owners choose to use a pay-per-click campaign to gain traffic in the short term. Pay-per-click programs such as Google AdWords and Bing are a way to see immediate results by placing a website in the Sponsored Listings section of the SE’s search results pages. Traffic from these campaigns can also help you judge the viability of the keywords you’ve chosen for the SEO campaign. When doing pay-per-click (PPC) you basically bid on a keyword or key-phrase. The more you pay, the higher you appear in the Sponsored Listings and the more traffic the web site will receive. The downside of pay-per-click, though is that you keep paying and paying and paying for the traffic. Soon you’ll spend way more on PPC than on the optimization services.

Press releases (PR’s) are another great way to generate traffic. So, just when you thought you could get away with writing standard press releases, now you would do well to write optimized press releases. The major SE’s scan these press releases like they do an HTML page, looking for keywords in order to categorize and rank the release. If you have a timely story or happening about your site, write and submit an optimized press release on a place such as PRWeb.com and see your traffic grow.

There are many other methods in gaining website traffic – too many to fully cover here. But to name a few, it is worth check out: article writing, opt-in email advertising, newsletter advertising (your own and others), give-aways, contests and promotions and banner advertisement.

A good idea once you gain targeted traffic is to employ a website monitoring service such as that from Webmetrics to monitor your site for downtime. Too much downtime may mean the robots are unable to spider your site and will adversely affect your rankings.

Search engine optimization is not an end all and be all for everyone when it comes to generating more traffic and sales. Many different and varied online marketing practices should be employed. When employing these other practices, though, don’t neglect SEO because you can be sure your competition isn’t neglecting it.