Attracting Visitors

Keep the site fresh.  You’ll want to offer content that’s educational, entertaining, or provides some other useful service.  Don’t simply copy and paste content from other people’s sites.  Not only is this unethical, but it won’t help you push your site up in the search results.  If you don’t consider yourself a good writer, there are plenty of cheap services that will create original content for your site (though I definitely don’t recommend this method over creating your own content).  Your content should also be updated regularly.  If these conditions aren’t met, you probably won’t be seeing many repeat visitors to your site.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is key.  SEO can be somewhat of a black magic these days.  Google uses their own algorithm to rank pages, and while there are many things you can do to increase your page ranking, the sophistication of the algorithm makes SEO much more challenging than it used to be.  We’ll be writing much more on SEO in the days and weeks to come, but below are a few tips to get you started.

Keywords, or words that describe the content of your site, play a fairly central role in SEO.  Google’s crawlers (the bots that peruse the internet automatically) look for keywords in your URL, the text on your site, and a dozen other places.  You should definitely keep that in mind when designing your site, but make sure that keyword density does not rise too high (over 10% or so), or it will look like keyword stuffing (artificially increasing the number of keywords on your site).

Links are another big category in SEO.  Linking to good quality sites related to yours in content and getting linked to by these same sites is a good way of increasing your page ranking.  You don’t want to collect too many links in a short period of time, or it’ll look like you’re buying them, but the more high quality links you can collect over time the better.  I’ve grossly oversimplified the matter, but you can check the advanced article section for more on linking.

Metatags used to be much more important, but it’s still a good idea to make sure you’ve filled out the <description> and <keyword> tags.

Your content also plays an important role.  Everything from the frequency of site updates to the uniqueness of your content to the size of your fonts contributes to your page ranking.

There’s a ton of other factors, like frames (avoid using them), the age of your site (the older the better, usually), and URL length, but we’ll explore those further in other articles.

Advertise your presence.  Passive methods are all well and good, but advertising can be a massive boon to a new site.  Look for forums that revolve around the topic upon which your site is based.  You can add to the conversation in these forums and offer helpful tips.  Submit press releases to places like e-zines that link back to your site.  At the very least this will help you get listed in search engines.  Certainly leverage social media.  Create a Facebook page and Twitter account for your site.  You can even use traditional methods, like fliers or ads in newspapers.  Just get the word out!

Give stuff away.  If you have a bit of money, you can hold contests in which you give away something relatively inexpensive but quite desirable, like an iPod nano.  It’s even better if your give-away relates to the content on your site.  If you advertise your prizes through your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you’ll be surprised how many additional visitors you attract.  Plus, if your give-away relates to the content of your site, you can be sure that the visitors who sign up are automatically your target audience.

Patience!  Don’t expect everything you do to work in a day (or even a month).  If you keep working on improving your site and stay diligent, visitors will come.  Most of all, don’t be discouraged.