Knowing how to increase traffic on your website is a wonderful skill to have. It is also an ongoing process. Google makes changes regularly, and new social sites and internet habits are developing all the time. It is still knowledge very much worth having though, as traffic to your website opens up wonderful avenues for the future. I am going to tell you some simple steps to increasing your traffic, as well as provide some resources for further learning.

Whether your website is for business, for fun, for educating, for charity, or just a local blog for your friends, getting more traffic is always going to be a good thing, as such, you will want to know how to do it without looking like a spammer, and what efficient ways there are that aren't going to cost you a lot of time wasting or even worse, money wasting.

There are many products and adverts out there that claim to boost your traffic overnight, or claim to get you thousands of highly targeted traffic every day. For the most part, these are scams, they will take some of your money, and then probably try to take some more, and even worse, they will probably damage your reputation with Google getting you LESS traffic in the long run. Ever since Google's panda update in April 2012, spamming the internet with links to your site and other "black-hat" techniques are punished by Google. There is however, one way to get a lot of traffic, that has always been true, and will always be true.

Writing Quality Content

Whatever the purpose of your site, if you fill it with quality content, people will remember it, will visit it again, and will even share it with their friends. You will start to build a reputation for yourself, and that will cause the cycle to happen again. Traffic takes time to build up, but if it is built up on strong foundations, it will last potentially forever.

Of course, getting rankings in the search engines is important too, and the more Google comes to love your site, the higher your rankings will be. Google will love your site if people love your site and share your site, and return to your site. You will however, need to attract small streams of traffic to your site in order to get that traffic loving your site in the first place though! So how can you do that?

Low Hanging Fruit

There are many 'keywords' out there, words and phrases that people search for and that your site will be ranked for. Many of the most highly searched keywords already have thousands, or millions of sites ranked for them though. It would be almost impossible for you to rank on the first two pages of Google for them, and if you aren't on the first two pages, it's not worth trying to rank, almost nobody clicks past page 2.

This is where 'low hanging fruit' comes in. These are keywords that only have 50 or more monthly searches to their name, but equally, have very little competition as well. Imagine you can find twenty keywords with 50 monthly searches, and due to low competition, you can rank on page 1 for all of them. That is 1,000 potential visits to your site per month, and without a lot of work required to rank. Generally, any keyword phrase that has more than 50 searches per month, and fewer than 400 competing pages (also known as quoted search results, the number of results you get from Google for typing your keyword phrase in "quotations") is a good keyword.

In Conclusion

Boosting your site's traffic doesn't have to be a difficult task, if you are prepared to spend a little time researching low competition keywords and writing quality content around those keywords. I would recommend you research some good keyword tools and learn how to use them, as well as consider joining some marketing communities in order to learn further tips about building and maintaining traffic.