Do you want to build a successful website and drive a lot of traffic to it? Then don’t try to fool mother Google.

It really does work like that, as most of us have learned from previous experience. However, building a successful website is possible. And we have a few easy steps which will help you achieve just that.

Here are some simple tips to drive traffic and what I found to work the best for me. I think it will work for you too.

Make content the king of your success and make the search engines “drool” over your content! If you actually publish something of value rather than trying to game the search engines you will be miles ahead of many….many marketers.

Don’t sit back and wait for traffic, go get it!

A lot of marketers build their website and wait for traffic to come to them. Do you know how many websites are out there? Millions, all competing for the same traffic. Who do you think will get the lions share of the traffic, those who sit back and wait for it to come to them or those that go out and get it?

Exactly, go out and get your traffic. Write a few articles and distribute them to the article directories. This will help you get one-way incoming links which the search engines love. Participate in related forums and provide valuable content and input in exchange for a link back to your website.

Forums have been a huge benefit for me. I started posting in several niche forums just to get a feel for what type of product they might want and before you know it I was getting traffic left and right. When I did some investigating I found it was coming from the forums that I had posted in. I mean BIG traffic and TARGETED traffic!

You can also advertise on select and related sites. Just make sure that the website you’re advertising on is actually a high ranking site with a steady stream of related visitors. The trick to getting traffic is to be consistent and to try a variety of different methods to help build incoming links.

Of course, you’ll also want to make sure that all of your website pages are search engine friendly, that your website has a user-friendly and search-engine friendly navigation structure.

Include plenty of links to outside resources and also link to other articles inside your website. This will get the reader to stay on your site longer, lower your bounce rate, and increase the value of your site in Google and other search engines.

Be a Real Person. Many websites are cold and unfriendly. This won’t help your sales. People are sceptical and when doing business on the web, they’re going to opt for websites which appear professional and also reassure them that there is indeed a real person behind the website.

Be sure to include an “about us” section on your website as well as a contact and privacy page. If you are having trouble creating a privacy policy page there is a WordPress plugin called Easy Privacy Policy that will create on for you in a snap.

A picture of you and your team (if you have one) is a nice touch as well. Share a little about your business and let them know you are there to help them. People like to know you are human. As quirky as it may sound…. the more human and less polished the website sometime the more traffic you get because it looks authentic.

Building a website requires a lot of hard work and a lot of common sense. Dont over think it adn put yourself in the shoes of your target market. What would they want to see when they come to your website…. and give it to them.

And finally, being personable and letting your customers know that you are there to help them should the decide to purchase anything from you. The more they trust you the more they will come back and the easier you might make a sale.

Do you have a website that struggles to get traffic? You aren’t alone. That was one of the most difficult things I had to figure out and it still changes all the time.

Without traffic you could have the best looking site and it wouldn’t matter. On the flip side, you could have a so…so…. looking site that gets tons of traffic and you could make a ton of mula (money) off of it.

I always like to show people the website Plenty Of Fish to illustrate my point. Even though they just recently went through a site upgrade, they still are pretty basic and they get an Enormous amount of traffic.

So just what is the right formula for more website traffic? There is no perfect road map and one source isn’t going to do it for you but here are some tips that will get you started and going in the right direction.

#1 – Write and distribute articles. This may seem like a simple strategy on the surface but it can be very powerful. Just writing one or two articles a day will quickly add to a lot of incoming one-way links (the type of links the search engines love most) for your business. I have about 100 articles submitted (over the last several years) to ezinearticles.com and other article directories and the send pretty good traffic.

Once you write the articles distribute them to a few top ranking directories. Don’t stop there, distribute a few articles to large online traffic websites  like Problogger, ShoeMoney, or John Chow directly. Give them exclusive use of the article in exchange for the incoming link. This is a great strategy you can easily apply.

#2 – Make your pages search engine and reader friendly. Striking the balance between writing for your human visitors as well as the search engines is simple if you stick to this rule – write for the reader first and then naturally insert your keyword phrases into your copy.

It’s also a good idea to include all the appropriate SEO tags on all your pages. These tags help the search engines find you. Here is a good article on Search Engine Optimization if you need further info.

#3 – Set up a search-engine friendly navigation structure. For the search engines (and your human visitors) to find the content on your website, you need a clear navigation structure. This structure should consist of your top topics which are also your keywords and then for each of those main pages you’ll have sub pages including extensions of that main keyword. A good example of this would be Traffic/On page SEO/Keyword Research.

By having the main keywords as your top topics on your navigation structure, your readers and the search engines will easily find your deeper pages of content. It’s also a good idea to include a back link to your home page on each page of your website. A clear and well-defined site map is a great addition as well. If you use WordPress (which I highly recommend) this is already done for you.

These three key steps are a good starting point to build your traffic. Apply them regularly and ensure that your content is fresh and up-to-date and you can’t help but to win over both the search engines and your human visitors too.

A great way to drive additional traffic to your main site is to create a YouTube channel to hub all your videos. This can be an excellent source of free traffic and we all can use more free traffic, cant we?

I started my YouTube video channel for The Guru Hub. Check it out to see all the videos I have posted.

I started The Guru Hub to create content to help others get started online. The plan was to base it a round a series of “how to ” videos to show you exactly how I did a lot of the things I did. There just isn’t anything better than video do accomplish this.

Along the way I started posting most of the videos to YouTube to create some additional free traffic but never knew it could all have a “home” for free on YouTube.

Your YouTube Channel will be your place to hub all your videos and pre-sell your cutomers on stopping by your main site. There are a couple main items that you should include or focus around to make this happen. I picked up some of this from Julie Perry who is now at Blast Media and has created an informative blog post called “7 Ways to Get Website Traffic From YouTube” on this topic.

First things first, remember the goal of your videos and your YouTube channel, to pre-sell your customers on a specific product, your business, your service, or all of the above. Keep this in mind as you create your videos (if you need help creating videos I have a free “how to ” video here)

Next, always lead off with your description with your main page URL. And make sure it is “clickable”! By this I mean add http:// to the front of your web address. This will make your web address a link to your site. This is very important because you want people to be able to click right over to your site quickly while you have their attention.

Try your hand at creating and customizing your YouTube channel and I will create a followup post on how to customize your channel a bit later, but for now just get it up and running as it can be a great traffic generator for you.

Please post your comments below. Has this been helpful?