If you ask 100 webmasters "what is most important to your website?” chances are at least 80% of them will tell you "traffic" is the most important. Traffic is the quantifiable measurement of the number of visitors the come to any given website. With literally BILLIONS of websites indexed by Google, being found in search engines organically can be near impossible for a new website. In fact, if your website isn't extremely niche and catering to only a small number of unique visitors, you're likely to remain out of the top 100 for competitive keywords.
It's difficult to launch a new website and successfully market it. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication, and a true commitment to quality. If your website isn't above and beyond the competition in front of it, then you need to re-evaluate the market you’re entering into. In order to gain traffic and retain it, you're really going to need to have something unique and special that make people say "wow" or "cool, I need to tell someone about this". Once you have that website, let's take a look at a few ways of generating some initial traffic. The idea here isn't to go from 10 visitors to 10,000 overnight. The idea is to generate a small amount of traffic here, a small amount there, and then let your website wow the visitors so that it creates a snowball effect and the word spreads fast! Again, if you don't have a website to WOW people, you may want to put your effort into building a better site and then work on traffic later on.
This guide will briefly touch on SEO efforts, but is no means an SEO guide. If you're new to the web and building websites, it's suggested you check out our
Complete Guide to SEO BEFORE trying to implement our traffic generation ideas. Everything is related and you really don't want to put the cart in front of the horse. Take your time to do things right the first time and you'll be happy with the results. Come out of the gate full-speed and you'll find yourself limping to the finish line (if you even get there).
