I was recently asked the question, now that my website is launched how do I get traffic? Every website needs traffic to generate leads or revenue. Unfortunately companies become obsessed with traffic and often loose site of the real reason they have a website, growing their business.

Be Prepared to Evaluate Your Website

Before worrying about traffic you should have a system in place to evaluate site performance. Running an analytics program such as Google Analytics is a great place to start. Decide which metrics are important for your business. Your site should be set up with several different conversion opportunities (appointment request, online sale, email sign up, forum registration, blog comment, etc.). Which conversion points will be used on your website would obviously depend on your business and sales process. Whatever conversion opportunities you choose, make sure they are all configured as goals in Google Analytics, so you can track the conversion rate.

If your website has a blog and forum you should set up separate profiles in Google Analytics for website, forum, and blog visitors. These visitors will behave very differently on your website. Separate profiles will make it easier to evaluate the overall performance of your site.

How to Start Generating Traffic

The majority of your websites traffic will come from search engines such as Google. For this reason you will want to make sure your website is “optimized” properly for search engines. Unique keyword-rich title tags (60 characters or less), description tags (160 characters or less), keyword-rich headings and subheadings, keyword-rich alt text for your images, and content that reads naturally but includes your keywords. Each page of your site should have only one topic, so it is very clear to your visitors and the search engines what the theme of the page is. This will help the search engines better serve your content and bring in more relevant traffic.

Search engines love content. HubSpot, an Internet marketing company, released a study that shows websites with blogs have 55% more traffic and 434% more indexed pages. For this reason you should consider adding a blog to your website. When setting up your blog, be sure to host it on your own domain, not through companies like blogger or wordpress.com. This is a common mistake. A blog is a marketing asset. If you choose to use blogger or wordpress.com you will be building up an asset on a domain you do not own.

Blogs are also magnets for inbound links which are the number one factor in search engine ranking. The value of those inbound links could be passed onto your own domain instead of Bloggers or wordpress.com if you were hosting your blog. In the same study performed by HubSpot, they found blogs on average have 97% more inbound links than a regular business website. A great way to drive traffic is through a great blog, that you post to at least once a week (more often is even better), and is hosted on your domain.

Have tips for increasing traffic? Share them by posting a comment below.