Unfortunately, when it comes to your website, the "if you build it, they will come" strategy just doesn't work. Fortunately, there are several ways to drive high-quality traffic to your website for little to no cost. The following 7 strategies will show you how:

1. Optimize your site for the search engines.

You'd have to be a fulltime search engine optimization expert to keep up with all the changes the major search engines make, but there are a few basic things you can do to help your site come up for relevant searches. Here are some to get you started:

a. Define your keywords - this is how people will find your business online. The trick is to find keywords that are highly relevant to what you offer and popular enough that they will attract decent traffic to your site, but not so competitive that you can't rank well using them. Use your keywords in your web page copy.

b. Create your metatags - this is how the search engines "read" your site. Put your keywords in your metatags on each page of your website.

c. Don't use lots of graphics or Flash, frames, or "alt" tags in HTML for pictures - search engines don't like them because it makes it hard for them to "read" your site.

d. Submit your site to the search engines (see #2).

e. Get links to your site - create a page in your website and call it either resources or links and add GOOD links, meaning relevant links. Linking is the second biggest indicator of how your site is ranked.

2. Submit your site to the search engines.

Why wait for the search engines' robots or spiders to find you? Submit your website (it's best if you submit every page individually) to at least these three major search engines manually. It's easy and only takes a minute.

Submit your web pages to:

Yahoo at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl DMoz at http://www.dmoz.com/add.html

3. Use pay-per-click advertising.

Google Adwords or Yahoo Overture both offer pay-per-click advertising options. You can create a ppc campaign for a very small investment, and because you have complete control over your budget, you can set it for whatever amount you feel comfortable with. It's very difficult to get to the top of the "organic" search results (on the left side of the search results page) but can be very easy to get on the first page of results with a PPC, bringing targeted traffic to you. The best part is you only pay when someone clicks your ad that takes them to your website.

I've been told that Overture is actually easier to learn for a beginner, but I personally use Adwords. I spend less than $50 a month on my Google campaigns at the moment and it consistently brings visitors to my website who are interested in what I have to offer.

4. Place or swap ads with other ezines in your niche.

Seek out other ezines in your niche whose publishers might be interested in swapping ads. They can either be formals ads, or just a recommendation within the content of the ezine itself. I've used this strategy myself, with the result being lots of new visitors to my website and new subscribers to my ezine.

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