Getting more traffic to your website requires a great deal of patience and planning. With enough planning your site can see better traffic. Google site ranking is probably the most powerful factor in increasing site traffic. A high Google site rank, of course this is much easier said than done. Google ranks sites based on an algorithm by which calculates the relative importance of the site. Higher ranked sites are then listed first when a relevant search is made. Though the exact ranking algorithm is a secret, the basic idea is that the web consists of links. Sites with more incoming links are probably more important than sites with less incoming links. The core to getting a high rank is therefore getting more links. Google keeps track of who is linking to whom and keeps a score. As more people link to your site your rank increased. In many ways these links can be thought of as the currency of the internet. But all links are not created equal. Links from credible sites (for example AP news, Bloomberg or The wall street journal ) are given more weight than lesser known sites. The greater the number of strong incoming links the higher the site ranking. For example if an incoming link is say Yahoo.com then the influence it has on your site is much greater than dozens of low ranking websites. So the basic idea is to have enough compelling information on your website to have more people with high ranking sites link to your site. If aggregator sites like digg.com or stumbleupon link to your site, you can be assured that your site will be flooded with traffic and will see a sudden rise in your page rank, which further increases traffic and the site gains momentum.

The best way to get noticed is to have engaging content that people want to link to

Here are 12 ways to improve traffic to your website
1. Make sure you regularly update your site with interesting information that others want to revisit and more importantly link to. Add a blog section and submit it to Google feedburner get visitors to subscribe to the feed by clicking on it. (notice the feedburner box in the sidepanel, hint, hint)

2. Provide opportunities for visitors to share links with others by adding “chicklets”- icons that link to preferred social aggregating sites like digg.com, stumbleupon and delicious etc, see the bottom of this article for examples. Please share this post too.

3. Get others to link from their blog to your site. I have seen some sites hold monthly raffles from the sites that link to yours (Google analytics provides this information). By offering some kind of incentive you can encourage more links. Just remember to reciprocate.

4. Regularly post your site updates with links back to your site on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts. Get your friends to click on your links.

5. Make sure Google can see your site. To check if Google even knows you exist type site:yoursite.com in the Google search page. You should see the pages of your site if Google knows you exist. If your site does not show up then proceed to the next item.

6. Get your site crawled by Google Google computers gradually comb through the links throughout the web and index everything they come across. If a website is reached by multiple paths then it is considered to have multiple links and given greater importance. This indexing is called crawling the web. Making sure that the Google crawlers know your site exists is one of the first steps in getting listed.
a. Submit your site to Google crawler
b. When your site is crawled, words on the top of the site are given greater importance. These are in a special part of your website called your header. Putting descriptive words relevant to your content gives the crawler something to read. These are called keywords. For example a cosmetics company may put lipstick, beauty, cosmetics in the keyword section of the website. Make sure that the keywords are relevant and show up frequently in the body of the page. Keywords that do not appear in the body of the site are given low weight and may be disregarded all together. Just repeating the same keyword in a nonsensical way or having irrelevant keywords will not help either. Some people say that the Google bot does not give much weight to the Keywords section at all and purely puts emphasis on the body of the page. So spending too much time on creative keywords may be counterproductive if the words do not appear in the body.
c. Use a sitemap: A sitemap is a special file (usually sitemap.xml) in the root section of your webserver that contains a hints for any crawler to find all the pages that are part of your website. This helps the crawler navigate through your site and therefore makes a better index.

7. Get on Google Local If you have a store front make sure your business shows up in Google local. Your listing here will ensure that your business shows up when searched for in Google maps. Click on add your business and fill in the details. You have to verify that the business being listed is yours. Google does this by either mailing a postcard with a PIN number on it or calling the main business phone number that you want listed. Entering the PIN number will activate your local listing.
Remember to add enough details to your listing such as the description and category will help your listing show up.

8. Add your business to Yelp! Yelp! is a business website that has local reviews. If your business is in the food or retail sector you can list it on Yelp!. Just watch out as customers can leave reviews. A few good reviews can make your business but a bad one can condemn it too.

9. Advertise your site So far all the above methods are free. Using Google adwords you can take advantage of Googles search driven advertising program to direct traffic to your site. Google does this by having you set up an account with Google and setting up ad campaigns say for a line of cosmetics. The ad campaign would have a set of keywords that you would find relevant to your product say “beauty” “cosmetics” “lipstick” etc. Now you set a budget that you would be willing to pay to display your ad against others that may be bidding for the same keywords. If you are the highest bidder for a search opportunity then your ad will be displayed called “Impressions”. If a searcher clicks on your ad they are directed to your website this is called “click through rate” (CTR). This certainly can get traffic but in my experience can get expensive very quickly. This may not be suitable for all products and services. (You can specify which territories your ad is displayed in).

10. Avoid things that Google cannot read Flash on a website cannot be crawled and therefore not indexed, use it sparingly. Graphics with tet embedded in it also cannot be indexed.

11. Make it mobile friendly Making a site that is easily read on a mobile phone browser or that has a mobile version can increase your traffic.

12. Tracking your progress Now that you have made changes to improve your traffic, you need to see if the changes have made any difference. This is where Google analytics comes in. After installing a tracking code either in the header or in the root of the server. Google will start to track all visitors to your site. This can provide very useful information about your audience. You can learn where your visitors are from, what kind of computer they use, how they get to your site (links vs google search), which articles they find interesting and even how much time they spend on a page. This can be useful in planning the kind of material that your audience finds interesting and therefore will come back to and yes link-to.
Always keep track of who links to your site, it is courteous to link back to them, both of you benefit.

Things that do not help:
1. Fill the page with irrelevant keywords.
2. Repeat the same content on different pages of your site.
3. Keep searching for your site.
4. Paying for search optimization.
5. Linking to weak sites that have a lot of spam.
6. Having spyware, malware or viruses.

Some useful links
Check your sites page rank here
Check your keywords here

Some related reading