Traffic ideas list

Here's a list of website traffic ideas that I've mentioned in pages of the site so far.

There are sure to be two or three things you can get to work on straight away.

No time to lose - let's get some traffic!

1. If you're new to site building, make sure you know what your site is about before you start!

2. Consider which web host will suit you best. Don't decide until you know what your site will be about and what kinds of features you will need.

3. Don't rush into choosing a domain name. Wait until you have a rough site plan and know exactly who the site is for and what it offers.

4. You may want to include the theme (or keyword) of your site within the domain name.

5. Find out what keywords searchers are looking for on the search engines by using keyword tools.

6. Focus each content page on a specific keyword.

7. Organize a clear site structure with easy navigation.

8. Use text links to link pages of your site together.

9. Use your page keyword in the meta tags for "keywords" and "description", in the title of your page, in your first headline on the page, in a text link and naturally throughout your page's content.

10. Keep site design simple.

11. Provide rich, interesting pages of information.

12. Submit your URL to Google, Windows Live (formerly MSN) and Yahoo.

13. Check if your pages are listed on the search engines by typing site:www.yourdomain.com into the search box.

14. Track mentions of your domain with Google Alerts.

15. Open links out of your site into a new browser window.

16. Put up a blog, best on-site, or off-site if not.

17. Subscribe to your own blog feed in your Google Homepage/Reader, MyYahoo! and MSN home pages (you'll have to register first.)

18. Sign up to blog directories and submit your feed.

19. Ping your blog once you've updated it.

20. If you link out of your site, open that page into a new browser window - keep traffic on your site.

21. Present information in a variety of ways to keep things interesting for your visitors - reviews, case studies, lists etc.

22. Add polls, an ezine, images or video to spice up your web page content.

23. Improve search engine ranks by writing a few quality articles and submitting them to article directories - with a link back to a page on your site.

24. Build links from social bookmarking or networking sites, choose a couple where you can usefully contribute, and get traffic and links back into your site.

25. Track your traffic with Statcounter or Google Analytics, complementing your web host's stats - try them out and see which one suits you best.

26. Examine your basic site content pages - how can you spruce up your home page, about page, links page, or contact page to make them even more useful to visitors?

Tons more traffic ideas yet to come, of course.