We all know how important it is for our websites to maintain a constant flow of traffic.  With many websites now monetised and functioning as income earners for their webmasters, it is vital that traffic continues to flow in a positive direction. What many webmasters fail to accomplish with their creations is a design that will continue to accumulate traffic, rather than just maintain a steady influx of visitors.  The following four tips will give you greater insight on how to change up your site’s routine to bring new faces in and help you expand your reach while also maintaining your existing base of visitors.

Advertising Opportunities

It has never been easier and cheaper to gain exposure through advertising and there are a variety of avenues in which you can advertise your site and all it has to offer.  Programs such as Google AdSense allow your site to appear at the very top of relevant search results and can give you access to customers, clients and visitors that you never would have found otherwise.  Since ads on search engines often appear indiscriminately near the top and look very similar to normal search results, there is a higher chance that a searcher who sees your ad will click on it without thinking twice about it.

Networking Exposure

Making valuable connections on other sites is a great way to boost traffic and increase your site’s exposure.  Whether you add your site to favourites such as StumbleUpon or Digg, or use social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote your site to friends and followers, reaching out to new faces will ultimately give your site additional traffic.  Other areas to consider boosting your “network” are blog comment sections and on-line service/product listings such as Craigslist (if your site offers services/products).  These venues are the equivalent of free advertising and in many instances will provide permanent backlinking.

Reciprocal Links

Rather than viewing fellow sites that offer similar access to content and services as your competitors, try viewing them as potential friends and drivers of traffic.  By agreeing to reciprocity in the form of links, visitors to each site will have access to the other site (in this case, you or your partner’s site) and each site will benefit from this strategy.  You retain all of your original traffic while adding some new traffic from the partnered site.  This strategy works well but each site should play host to just one link/page for reciprocal links as any more can actually cause search engines to downgrade your ratings.

Proper Indexing

When it comes to being found, one of the best ways is by having proper code and HTML-compliant pages that are all linked together in some form.  Any page that does not have a direct link from another page on your site is subject to not being indexed, giving you a lesser chance of the site being discovered in any specific search result.  A great way to see how many of your pages are indexed is the Pingler Search Engine Saturation Checker; simply put in your URL and the tool will scan search engines to locate which of your pages are indexed and discoverable via search engines.