Building your own website that matches the vision of your business is an impressive feat. But once you hit that publish button and push your site live for the world to see, what comes next?

While your first instinct may be to sit back, relax, and wait to reap the benefits, you’re not done yet.

You see, at this moment there are over one billion websites live on the Internet. This means, in order to gain web traffic, you need to stand out from the crowd.

Some people will tell you you’ll need a high budget to gain traction. We’re here to tell you otherwise. Throughout this blog post, we’ll detail ways to drive traffic to your website that won’t cost an arm and a leg.

Content, content, and more content

A great way to gain web traffic (and repeat visitors!) is to always have fresh, new content. The benefits of a frequently-updated website come two-fold: Google prioritizes websites that are updated regularly to give you a boost in search engine rankings, and visitors will want to come back to your website to see your updates giving your business a following.

Get ahead of the pack

One question business owners frequently ask us is, “How can I make it to the first page of Google search results?” One sure-fire way to get to the top of search rankings is through Search Engine Marketing (SEM), or paid advertising.

One myth about SEM is that you need to either be a Google AdWords Pro, or hire an agency in order to target the right keywords and gain traction through search engine marketing. Becoming an AdWords pro and monitoring campaigns would take an abundance of time, and hiring an agency will run a high budget.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. Our advertising partner, SiteWit, makes it possible to build your own SEM ads, and their automated bidding will monitor your campaigns to boot. Best of all, their packages start as low as $50. You can check it our here.

Optimize for success

Another imperative part of gaining web traffic is by optimizing your website for search engines. Gaining traffic through SEO takes some planning. That said, once you have developed a strategy, implementing that strategy with Yola is no problem. You can easily get started in the following places:

• Header tags (While in Sitebuilder, Page tab > Heading)
• Metadata, including page title, metadescription, keywords (Page tab > Metadata)
• Alt image tags (Select a photo on your site > Edit > Alt tag)

Find out more information on optimizing your website for search engines in this tutorial.

Go social and beyond

With stats showing 78% of the US population as having social media profiles, our next tip to gaining traction is through display advertising. Display advertising allows you to get your business found through banner ads on major websites such as Facebook. It can also be used to target people who have already been to your website, giving them a little nudge to convert them into customers.

Along with SEM advertising, our marketing partner SiteWit also specializes in gaining traction for businesses through display advertising. And best of all, their designers will create your banner ads for you – for free. Check them out here!

Gain exposure

Our final tip on gaining web traffic: do it through guest blogging. There are multiple benefits that come from writing articles for someone else’s blog. You get to speak to a different audience, gaining exposure to you and your business, and you also have the opportunity to gain backlinks, incoming links from another website, which have proven to add SEO value to your website.

Reach out to companies within your industry (note: but probably not your competitors), pitching blog titles that are both relevant to their audience and your product. But again, relevancy is key here. Most blogs will not want to post a pure advertisement for free.

As you can see, there are an array of options when it comes to gaining web traffic and they don’t have to break the bank. Let us know how these work out for you in the comments below!