Get Social, Get Traffic
By FTS | June 3rd, 2011There are so many people today that have their own website or blog. As a web publisher I love that there’s so many people that I can speak to about web design. The topic of how to increase website traffic or how to increase website ranking typically comes up in conversation without fail. When discussing search engine optimization and site promotion I love to bring up free methods. After all, what’s not to like about free methods of promoting your website or blog? A large free resource that all web publishers use often, but may not take advantage of for promoting their site or blog is social networks.
The majority of people who use the internet regularly belong to a social network, and with that being said it just makes sense to use these free resources to reach as many people as possible. Some social networks even devoted sections of their sites to web publishers and business owners to promote their site or business.
Facebook for example, gives you the option to create a page just for the purpose of promotion. This page works similar to Facebook pages. The main difference is that visitors have the option to “like” the page opposed to friending, and the page is managed by administrators. Other than that this special promotional page can be used to tell people about your site, post the latest site related news and updates on the wall, and upload pictures. Bloggers should definitely take advantage of this page because RSS feeds can be linked to these pages, and a summary as well as a link to the blog posts can be automatically posted on the wall.
Another fantastic social network to start using is Twitter. So many people use Twitter so it’s simple way to promote a site or service because you literally will not have a problem reaching your targeted demographic. This being said don’t abuse Twitter and spam your site because chances are you will get banned, or people will just ignore your tweets after discovering you are a spammer. Promote your website or blog appropriately by presenting unique relevant tweets with a link to your site. By tweeting this way any traffic that you do get is most likely to be targeted and those people will be interested in what your site has to offer. RSS feeds can also be connected to Twitter in the same capacity as it can with Facebook, and tweets will be sent out with a brief summary and hyperlink to the blog post.
The last social network that I would like to mention is YouTube. Being creative and making an entertaining or informative video and uploading it to YouTube can produce a significant amount of traffic for your website or blog; especially if your video goes viral.
Overall, social networks are an amazing free resource that should be taken advantage and used for promoting websites and blogs. Hopefully this article was helpful and helps some of you publishers as you work towards being listed on google page one.
More information:
Website Tips
Tags: SEO, Social Networks, traffic, web development, Website Tips
