Methods to increase website traffic are being spun, packaged, wrapped up in e-literature, and sold for a price. Some of these methods work. Unfortunately, a number of them are also known as “black hat” or are borderline black hat and will only work for a short period of time. They’ll probably stop working right about the time you buy the ebook, or get around to reading it and implement it. Since I’m sure you’re taking a long term approach to your website, you’ll want to dedicate your time and effort to creating a less risky, and more lasting traffic strategy.

Some of these tricks will work, but I’d like to discuss several “white hat” methods that result in lasting traffic. They’re not exciting, and they’re not kept under lock and key by any guru, but they’re being used successfully by many webmasters. In fact, it’s a way to future-proof your Web business. These methods will work to produce free traffic for any site you choose for many months and years to come.

Article marketing — Using article marketing to increase website traffic offers several major benefits. The article marketing sites themselves often have high authority with Google and offer excellent backlinks, which can drive up your search engine rankings. In addition, because of the authority that these sites have, your posted articles will often rank high in the engines.

The high profile article sites create a viral effect and other website owners will pick up your articles and publish them. This increases your reach and your backlinks. On top of that, when people read your article and then decide to click through to your site, they’re showing enough confidence in your content to want to read more. These are pre-sold visitors.

Social bookmarking — Social bookmarking is an activity that can have great rewards for your site. It’s easy to create a number of links back to your sites by social bookmarking a few pages. You can also encourage your visitors to do this for you by placing icons with links to popular social bookmarking sites. In addition, you can increase traffic to your own websites by bookmarking sites that link to yours.

Adding pages — You can never go wrong by building more content. More pages not only means more value for your visitor, it also means more linking opportunities, more PageRank, and more hooks for the search engines to bite into. The long term result, of course, is increasing website traffic. Many sites will come and go, and it’s important to create content so that your site becomes a valuable resource. Content equals staying power.

Social media and community sites — Many people think of Reddit and Digg, but forget about repurposing their content on other social media sites. Instead of trying to play the very difficult game of who’s going to Digg me, you should look at user generated content sites that allow you to post a link to your site. Start with the biggest ones first, as they offer great backlinks and the potential for high traffic. These include Hubpages, Squidoo, and Buzzle, as well as a number of up and coming community sites published on the Ning platform and others like Tumblr.

These are not the only effective white hat methods to increase website traffic, but they certainly work to produce lasting results with no risk. Individually they work well, and in combination they’re even more powerful. So forget about those short-lived techniques that might get you banned, and increase your visitor count with these long term strategies.

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