How to Drive Traffic With Off-Page Tactics

Driving traffic to your website is critical to the success of your business. There are many ways to drive traffic, including the use of on-page tactics and off-page tactics. This article will define both but will focus on off-page tactics.

In the past, the search engine optimizations (SEO) experts would concentrate on the content and structure of websites, on-page SEO. The biggest concern at the time was making sure that the clients’ websites were set up correctly with the right meta text, page titles, placement of content, names of images, etc. Nowadays, the definition of SEO means a great deal more than it did years ago. At the moment, the search engines’ indexing spiders are now looking for activity rather than back links.

SEO is divided into to three categories:

• On-page SEO: optimize content, keywords and key phrases, meta tags and internal links
• Off-page SEO: back links, social media, press releases, forum postings
• Off-page Paid SEO Services: Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Adwords
  (we don’t endorse this category and, therefore, will not discuss it here)

SEO is the process of improving the quality or volume of traffic to a website from search engines via natural or unpaid (organic or algorithmic) search results. With that in mind, you might be wondering why so many people are writing about off-page SEO since the term really doesn’t mean anything.

There are many ways to drive traffic with off-page SEO tactics, including:

• Publishing blogs/press releases, news and submitting them to bookmarking websites: Most members of the online community realize the importance of blogging and new updates on business websites. They attract search engine crawlers to visit the website more frequently as well as helping to generate more back links by submitting those articles on press release and bookmarking websites. Many bookmarking websites have cropped up lately and the vast majority of them are an excellent source for generating traffic for your website. Some of the more popular ones are Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Kaboodle, Technorati, and Clipmarks.
   
• Get involved with forums and discussion boards: If you want to drive a great deal of traffic to your website, this is an excellent way to do it. A quick and easy way to reach the other members of your online community is by asking a thought-provoking question or posting an enticing question. In the beginning of your traffic-generating campaign, if you spend 20 minutes a day on forums for two weeks, you will start to see a significant increase. Of course, it goes without saying that you need to make sure that your responses to comments are as enticing as the original content that you posted. If you don’t do that, you will be running the risk of being labeled as a spammer and possibly being banned from posting altogether.
   
• Create your full social profile and share news updates with your online community: You should start with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You need to create a comprehensive profile on those social media channels for your business. You will need to sign up and you will be provided with a URL of your profile. That is your social profile. Once you have created a profile on those social media channels, you need to start engaging people in the following ways:
  • Tweet about your business on Twitter
  • Do regular status updates on Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Syndicate your blog articles on discussion forums and boards of several social networks
  • Use Flickr to post an effective photograph or photographs about your business, products and services. People love to see graphics accompanying the article that they are interested in reading
     

  Once you have set up your social media profiles, the next step is inviting other people to connect with you.
   

• Article rewriting and distributing: The latest thing to do is to take an article that is already written and rewrite it as a different version. You can then start distributing the new, rewritten version to numerous bookmarking and press release sites. The search engine crawlers will consider your content as original and will index it as always.
   
• Local business listings on search engines and in yellow pages: The major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing allow business owners to submit the details of their business (name, address, phone number, etc). This is tremendously helpful in getting local traffic to your website. You should make sure that your business is listed on all local listing websites, such as Hotfrog, Business.com, Superpages, Merchant Circle, and Google Places.

Conclusion

Driving traffic to your website is an extremely important part of the ultimate success of your business. Whether you like it or not, SEO is key to that success and as a business owner, you have to play by the rules of the Web. There are many different ways to generate traffic to your website. One thing to remember is that you must be consistent with the amount of time and effort that you dedicate to working on your web presence, including traffic building and back link building.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications> for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.