I’m in love with the fundamentals. Most business owners are astounded at the performance of their websites once just the basics are implemented because they’ve lacked solid consulting & development for so long. This not-so-exhaustive list of tips shouldn’t be taken as the canonical strategy for driving traffic. Still, it does offer some great reminders of both free and paid online strategies to help boost your website traffic and engage those visitors on a more robust level using a variety of online marketing tactics.

1. Produce Videos on YouTube

Video is easy for people to engage with your brand and learn more about your business. Plus, one of the most significant search engines other than Google is none other than YouTube. It is crucial to include YouTube in your arsenal of traffic strategies. Create your own YouTube channel. Produce and upload original videos with interesting content to your YouTube channel. Using the “annotation” feature while editing YouTube videos, you can add a call to action for viewers to go to your website URL. Another strategy is to interlink your videos with annotations to increase views and traffic. Optimize your YouTube channel by including a link to your website in the profile information on the left panel.

2. Build & Use Your Email List

Building an email list enables you to drive traffic at the click of a button. With a substantial number of subscribers in your email list, you can also build a community around your site or even your niche and make sales after establishing a relationship with your list. However, it takes time, effort, and the right strategies to attract people to subscribe to your list. Also, using an autoresponder service to build your email list is essential. You can check out MailChimp or Constant Contact.

3. Use Keywords In Your Titles

You have a bit a little careful here.  You don’t want to stuff (see Keyword Stuffing) your pages, but you want to consider using some keywords, words likely average users will be typing when searching for your product, service, or organization.  To get more traffic to your website, knowing where all that traffic is coming from is crucial. Most online traffic finds content on search engines using keywords; hence the first step to getting found on search engines is to include keywords in your website. We call this process On-Page Search Engine Optimization. One element to include keywords in is in your title tag, the title of your website. There are many other elements to search engine optimization.

4. Use Facebook Ads To Drive Brand Awareness

Facebook ads allow you to target your specific market according to their demographics, geographical residence, and users’ preferences. As a result of Facebook’s large user base, you have a large group to market to, even if you narrow it down to your niche.  With most Facebook campaigns, I find that conversion is mixed.  Or rather, it’s not what you wish it would be, but that doesn’t detract from the valuable awareness benefits you get from having people see your brand on their Facebook pages regularly.  With brings us to the next tip…

5. Post Content Regularly

Everyone gets in a publication rut occasionally, but what drives brands online is their ability to publish new content online. You’ve got to think about it from the search engines’ perspective & they’re in the business of showing the most relevant content based on what an individual is searching for. It’s not the only factor, but if you’re publishing regularly, that’s just a bonus to search engines. To generate a regular readership on your website, produce content regularly. Try to get your next few posts on standby so that you can always get your content out on the same day, even if your week gets crazy and you don’t have a chance to create new content.

6. Submit your Site to Search Engines Manually

Make it a habit of manually submitting your new site to Google, Yahoo, and BING to inform them to crawl it regularly. For a WordPress blog, install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, like SEO by Yoast, to enable crawling spiders to check out your site regularly.

You have a login to Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools. Still, it’s worth the effort, and I like looking at the metrics and performance of the site inside these administrative interfaces to compare and contrast with some of the other tools available to get a more global view. You’ll likely find that your ranking across the various search engines is different and discover some strategies to enhance your listings.