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Drawing traffic to a website is nolonger a secret. However, It is believed that with internet marketing, the speed at which innovations change is three times faster than the way things change in normal life. This is why you will hear about one superb internet marketing strategy or trick and within three months it is no longer effective. That is how fast things change in internet marketing.

Fortunately,with all that speed,Three strategies have continued to work effectively throught a number of years and if you incoperate them in your website marketing strategy,they will form a basis for your online success.

So what are the three startegies that have stood the test of time since their invention or discovery?One is the use of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, such as Google Adwords. PPC (with well written ads) will drive you targeted traffic instantly. The only drawback is that it will cost you money (as much as you are willing to pay), but there are some techniques to drive more clicks for less money.

To learn how to use Adwords in a way that will drive you a lot of traffic for less money, I suggest the Google Cash guide. Another recommended guide is Rich Jerk guide. It teaches many useful web marketing techniques in a very humorous but effective way.

It is not recommended to try Adwords campaign without any basic knowledge. If you make mistakes (such as choosing the wrong keywords, the wrong countries or the wrong ads) Google will penalize you by rising your clicks cost, so don't even consider to try a campaign before reading an expert Google guide.

The second strategy to draw traffic to your website is to use viral marketing.

This is by far one of the most effective techniques you can use to drive traffic to your website. But it requires hard work at the start and alot of patience.Viral marketing is like wordof mouth in the ofline marketing.
An example is where by X will learn about your great product or service and then inform his friend Y who will then inform his friend z.But it is rare that X will inform only Y. He will iform more than one individual. So your customer base will grow exponentially.But how do you start viral marketing?

There are many ways to do this.Some include:
-Write a book on a topic related to your product or service. Inside the ebook, include links to your website. Then give this book out for free and give who ever downloads it the right to give it away for free on their website. For even effective results, design promotional materials such as banners, text links and others that they can use to easily give away your ebook. This will spread a virus accross the internet that will gradually explode the traffic to your website.

-Design a free but useful software and give it away for free just like the ebook above. You do not neccessarily have to develope this software on your own. You can out source people to design it for you. My favourite places to get software designers is Rentacoder.com, elance and many other places if you check on google.

-join viral marketing websites such as freeviral.com. These will also help you in starting your viral campaign. The only problem is that these are now over saturated and it may be hard to raise a significant number of traffic from these.

To learn how to effectively use viral marketing and the latest developements in viral marketing,I suggest you first read and try out the viral marketing chemistry set by mark Joyner and Telman.
When viral marketing is used effectively, It can really bring you alot of traffic and targeted traffic in this case.

The third effective strategy to draw traffic to your website is to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO requires more work, and some patience. It won't drive you traffic instantly but it has a great advantage over PPC - once your site is optimized and reach a top place in organic search engines, you will receive tons of traffic for free!

Organic search results (Visitors from search engines) are considered by most people as more reliable than sponsored results, so they drive more sells.

A well optimized site would take several months to reach a top position (depends on the keywords used and the level of competition).

Gaining a high rank is done by analyzing the competition's sites SEO properties for your main keywords, and trying to copy their methods and do a little bit better to out rank them.

1. Onpage Optimization

2. Offpage Optimization

Onpage factors include:

Title - The title of the page should include your main keywords and be as short as possible to give them more weight.

Header Tags - You should include your main keywords within header tags, particularly the H1 tag which is usually simply the title of your content. Other keywords should appear in sub-headings, which are your H2 tags. You should also bold and underline these titles containing your keywords.

Keyword Density - You should include your main keywords as often as possible without making the content seem spammy or nonsensical.

Meta Tags / Descriptions - You should use meta tags to write a description of your webpage's content. This will not appear on the actual webpage, but in the description in the search engine results. It should be compelling so visitors click on the link to your site, as well as including your main keywords for optimization purposes.

Image Tags - If you have any graphics on your site, you should include your main keywords in the alt tag of each image.

Offpage Optimization:

While onpage optimization is still something you should do, it's NOT what will get you high search engine rankings. It's the offpage optimization factors that will.Offpage Optimisation forms the bigest percentage of a website SEO campaign. This is where most of the time goes and where patience is stretched.This can basically be summed up in one word- LINKS.

Google, and most other search engines, place great emphasis on both the quality and quantity of inward links to your site. You want to get as many links as possible, but you should place more emphasis on getting quality links from sites similar in subject to your own, and from pages with high page rank (PR).

Offpage parameters include:

- Which websites link to you
- The number of websites linking to you
- The PR of the website linking to you
- The page title of the website linking to you
- The anchor text used in the link linking to you
- The number and type of links linking to the website that's linking to you
- The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
- The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
- Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.

Doing search engine optimization can be done manually, but it is very time consuming.There are several programs that automate SEO processes.

I personally use WebCEO and SEO Elite.These software will allow you to analyze your competition for any keyword, and will tell you what sites link to them, their respective PR, how valuable each link is in terms of SEO, contact address of link partner and much more.
This will enable you to contact these good link partners yourself and get them to link to your site as well.The software will also allow you to find link partners for any keyword of your choice, as well as checking that all your current link partners are still linking back to you. It will also tell you where you rank in the major search engines for any given keyword.