Building a website can present itself as a challenge, but once it's completed you need people to know about it. How does one go about getting a steady flow of online traffic? The article that you're reading will explain what to do and give you the marketing edge!

1. The fastest way to get hits is to take part in what you're seeing. Write articles. Writing articles will get you a lot of hits for your site. You can write about anything you'd like, really. The secret of getting it to work is to make your articles go hand-in-hand with what you have to offer. If you are a political genius, you could write political articles. If you're a specialist in health care, you can write about the medications and technologies available to the health field. It's wise to stick with what you know. You wouldn't want to write about nuclear fission, if you're not in that field of work.

Ezines will pick up your material if they like what they see. That's more exposure for you. The more exposure you gain, the more hits your site will receive. Be sure to always invite the reader to visit your site. Give them a reason to. Don't say, "Visit my site at "X" address." It's all about exposure, and to get that exposure you will have to promote yourself.

2. Submit to the search engines. Everyone would like to have a number one spot on Google or Yahoo. You'll get there, but you'll have to work for it. There are free sites that offer search engine submissions to the top search engines. http://www.addme.com will do this for free. You will have to register for a few things, but it will get you listed. It won't cost you a dime.

3. Always try to link to others who are in the same category as you. If you're an author, link to other authors. There's no need to worry about competition. You'll gain a lot of exposure by doing so. The search engines also use this in their spiders to discover your page ranking. If you have a thousand hits, your page ranking will grow. The higher page ranking you have, the more exposure you'll receive. Do not join a link exchange farm on the internet. Google bans websites that take part in that. Link exchange farms exists to try to manipulate the search engines into including them. In reality, it only hurts your cause. If you get banned for joining one of them, there goes your search engine traffic. Link exchange farms will only harm you. I can't stress that enough.

4. This is similar to mutual links, but have a few outgoing links on your site. You'll get search engine points for having a few of them. If you have thirty links that are similar to yours that backlink to you, add three outgoing links that have nothing to do with what you're doing. It would be best to have those outgoing links with a higher page ranking. You can do research on what sites have higher page rankings with such online tools, such as http://www.iwebtool.com

5. Just get out and promote your site with every chance you get. If you belong to any message boards, add your site in your signature. You may get a few hits by doing so. You'll want to give them a reason to visit. Don't spam and follow all rules that the administrators have in place.

It sounds simple, and it really is. It's not that hard, it's just learing how to get started. I hope that you have gained some knowledge on how to get that much needed web traffic to your site. There are other ways to gain traffic, but this is basically the crash course. When you get this down pat, you can branch out to traffic generators and the such. The only problem with those is that no one hardly stays long enough to visit your site. Most people only stay long enough to get points to build up their web traffic.