“As air is to living beings so is traffic to any online business. Without air, living beings will die, without traffic online business will perish.” Without traffic, online businesses and websites cannot thrive.  In order to gain more traffic to your site, you don’t only have to attract the attention of people to your site but also retain their interest.  For this, you need to design your website in such a way that it is attractive as well as useful for visitors.

There are certain smart ways and techniques that will aid in gaining more traffic to your site. These are as follows:

1. Design good URL’s and domains:  Use keywords in the File titles and URL’s. URL’s should be SEO friendly and not very long.   A good domain is a must for any website. You can use domains with .com or .net as they are very popular and SEO friendly.
2. Design an attractive logo: A distinct logo is an identifying factor for any business. Design a logo that is easily recognizable and remembered. It should complement your site name and match the vision of your website.
3. Keyword research is very important. Establish the task at the beginning itself. You can use tools like Adwords Keyword tool from Google, WordTracker or Keyword Discovery for this purpose.
4. Create good Content: Creating unique yet useful content is another great way to divert traffic to your site. Content should be informative, attractive and understandable by the visitors.  Do not use the same phrases and writing style for your product description as used by your competitors as it tends to be repetitive and monotonous.  Instead use a simple and unique description that is lucid and easily understood by everyone.
5. Guest Posts: Request website owners with substantial audiences to allow you to post blogs in their sites. This will make your content visible to a larger audience thus driving some traffic to your site. It will also provide you with important backlinks that will improve your ranking and visibility in the search engines.
6. Update blogs: If you wish to increase your visibility and rank so that more visitors can reach you, remain updated. Update your blogs and include innovative and interesting ones. Visitors will return to your page only if they find some new and exciting stuff in it.
7. Building good backlinks: A link from a key site is far more useful in improving your rank than a 100 links from inferior sites. Avoid linking to irrelevant sites which are in no way related to your website or business.
8. Holding contests: Holding contests can be a great idea to increase the site’s popularity among users. You may organize contests like ‘content writing contest’ in which the best entry will win an attractive prize. Also rewards can be given to persons referring maximum traffic to the site.
9. Build a site map: In order to ease the work of the indexing programmes like spiders and robots, site maps can be designed by your site so that they can easily crawl through your webpages and increase your visibility.
10. Promote your website in social media: Social media provides a platform for you to interact with a larger audience. Join popular websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Linkedln and YouTube to increase your popularity. Welcome comments and suggestions from customers and reply to any queries they have. You can also advertise your services through this media.

As traffic is so important for businesses online, it is very important that you retain your former customers while seeking new visitors. Hope that the above points will be useful for improving traffic to your site.

Author Bio: The guest post was contributed by Lucy, financial guest blogger from Manchester, UK. Wrote many articles on ppi claims . Find out more about her blogs @financeport.