As Google has grown, its dominance in the world of search and web traffic has solidified to the point that many do not even consider other search engines or methods that aren’t crucial to improving performance with the search giant. With more than sixty five percent search market share in most countries, it comes as no surprise that this reaction to developments has manifested. Nevertheless, anyone who has been around since the beginning of the internet knows that all good things sooner or later come to an end, and new alternatives and replacements are always on the horizon. Bing, for instance, continues to grow while Google more or less has flat-lined in terms of search market share. It can be easy to forget that there are plenty of other ways to boost your traffic without the use of Google, and even more important, some of these methods are quite easy to utilize. We’ll discuss a few of these methods below so that you can diversify your SEO and marketing strategies.

Blog and Forum Comments

An old yet reliable way to boost traffic, many successful website and blogs utilize the tactic of forum and blog commenting to bring in traffic from sources other than Google. Anyone who is pinging blogs and forums, and keeping track of their inbound traffic sources through an analytics program will tell you that when done properly, a sizeable share of their traffic comes through this source. You can find relevant forums to comment on by using Google to search with your keywords and the tag “inurl:forum”. Blogs in your niche can be found easily as well, with many of them enjoying hundreds to hundreds of thousands of monthly visits. As long as you provide relevant commentary that incorporates your links intelligently, you’ll have no trouble spreading the word about your blog or website to others.

Question and Answer Sites

People are always looking for answers: it is a natural part of life. The internet gives people the ability to ask and answer just about anything, so it should be a given that sites which cater to this inquiry are great places from which to build traffic. A few examples of websites you can target include Ask, Quora and Yahoo Answers – all of which remain quite popular, even if their search-based cousins do not – and an intelligent approach like mentioned above with pinging blogs can yield fantastic results. There will no doubt be questions and answers that pertain to your niche; use these opportunities as advantages! You may even be able to ask questions yourself, and subtly plug your website with an included link. Be creative!

Social Media

Last but definitely not least, social media presents a plethora of opportunities for sharing your website – both in overt and covert manners. You can use an information-based approach in response to questions or issues like mentioned above, or you can invest in a social media presence that combines paid marketing with organic growth to bring in even more traffic. We highly recommend that you do both, as the sky is the limit when it comes to potential traffic through sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.