Website traffic is good; in fact for many business owners, driving traffic to their website is their primary business-building traffic. And while traffic may be all well and good, what you really want is targeted website traffic. You want the people visiting your website to be potential prospects. You want them to be future customers, not tire kickers or looky loos.

Here are seven effective strategies to guarantee targeted website traffic.

#1 PPC ads. Of course, not all PPC ad campaigns generate targeted traffic. You have to study your prospects and design keyword-specific ads that send traffic to a web page related to the ad. For a website about dog training where they have to dig to find your potty training information, you’re not sending the right kind of targeted website traffic to the right place. Send them directly to your potty training product page.

#2 Classified advertisements. Use the same advice and strategy as with PPC ads above.

#3 A squeeze page, opt-in list and targeted email messages. A squeeze page is essentially a way to capture the email addresses of people who are actually interested in receiving your information. True, they may be after your giveaway but that’s okay – they’re still a qualified prospect. Once you have their email address, you can begin sending them informative, entertaining and slightly promotional messages, all of which are designed to send them directly to your website – targeted website traffic.

#4 Article marketing. Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate targeted website traffic. When you publish quality content, and it gets published online on article directories and republished on other websites, you’re reaching a wider audience. The link(s) in your article and in your bio box can all send targeted traffic right back to your website. The more articles you publish, the more targeted traffic you generate. It’s a simple equation.

#5 Blog and guest blog. Use the same advice and strategy as with article marketing above.

#6 Social networking. Social networking can send tons of traffic to your website simply because people are curious about you and your business. However, if you’re strategic about your social networking strategy you will occasionally include links to your website with attention-grabbing posts or headlines. The result: targeted traffic.

#7 Comment on blogs and forums. On most forums and blogs when you participate and comment you can post a link to your website in your signature. This does generate curious folks who just want to know “who said that?!” However, when you participate in forums and blogs that are relevant to your website and industry niche, you’re sending targeted traffic to your website.

You can also try unique approaches like posting reviews on websites and directories for products related to your industry and include a link to your website in your review profile, for example reviewing on Amazon.com. You can post answers on Yahoo! Answers and you can post videos or Podcasts on directories and drive traffic to your site much like you would with article marketing.

There are a number of creative ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is where the money is. Analyze your traffic-generating strategies and tactics to ensure you’re sending the right kind of traffic to your website.

If you’re an internet marketer, then chances are you have a lot on your plate. Many internet marketers work alone, though some have a partner, and this means that they’re not only the CEO – they’re the accountant, the administrator, the marketing consultant, the salesperson, the technical adviser, and so on. You wear many hats. All of these hats take time, effort, planning and follow through, and it’s easy to lose sight of one simple fact:

The more conversions you have, the bigger your bottom line.

While you’re spending all of that time and effort on your content strategy, your social networking strategy, your traffic generation strategy, your advertising strategy and other marketing strategies, you could be reaching your profit goals with a little more attention to your sales page.

Imagine this. Imagine you have a sales page that converts at 4%. That’s a respectable conversion rate to be sure, and better than many sales pages. If you have a product that sells for $100 (we’ll keep the math easy here) then for every 1000 visitors you’re making…$4000.

Up that conversion rate to 6%, which may require nothing more than fine tuning your call to action, and you’re up to $6000. That’s $2000 for a few tweaks on your sales page that didn’t cost you any extra money to produce. Unlike a PPC ad campaign addition, a new eBook giveaway, an advertisement on a high trafficked website, and so on. This fine tuning your sales page didn’t cost you anything.

Of course if you can get your sales page to kick out a 10% conversion rate then….yeah, the math is looking pretty good now, right? Spending time fine tuning your sales page and boosting conversions will generate a higher rate of return than many other tactics and strategies.

The key to boosting conversions is testing and tracking – you have to know what your tweaking is doing. If you change your call to action, does it generate more sales or less? Split testing is the best way to determine the effectiveness of a change. One page you’re sending traffic to will be identical to the other page you’re sending traffic to with one exception: the thing you’re testing. And how you send traffic to them must be the same also; you want to isolate the variable being tested, so all other processes and content must be the same.

Of course it’s also important to set goals, know your audience and continue to do all of the things necessary to drive traffic to your sales pages. However, down the line when you’re looking to boost your business and wondering what you should do first, take a look at the conversion rate on your sales page. If it can be improved, you’d be a wise and savvy entrepreneur to focus your attention there. To your success!

Online, one of the most significant keys to success is getting website traffic. The more visitors you have, the better your sales and profits. Presumably you have a niche and you know your keywords, and regularly conduct keyword research to stay on top of what’s popular. Based on those assumptions here are five quick and easy tips to get website traffic fast!

Tip #1 Make sure you’re actually tagging your keywords.

Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your content and then neglect to tag them on your webpage? Tags are where search engines look and if there are no tags they’ll pass right by your web pages. Here’s a quick brief on tags.

There are a number of tag types including,

• Title tags. Title tags are quite possibly the most important place to situate your keywords. Here’s what they look like -Primary keyword phrase here. Your title tag is where you place your primary keyword or keyword phrase. The sentence will describe your business in less than 90 characters.
• Header Tags. Header tags are next in order of importance to search engines. They’re ranked in order of importance and look like this – Primary and/or Secondary keywords here

The “1” designates this header as the most important header on the page.

• Meta Tags. Meta tags provide the small descriptive text found underneath the title tag on the search engine results page. Like title tags these should be kept brief, informative and up to date.
• Alt Tags. Alt tags are used to provide a text description of a graphic. Each graphic on your site should have a description and an alt tag.

Tip #2 Add content to your site daily

Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking. Content is what search engine spiders look for and index – without it there’s nothing to index or rank. Give visitors and search engines a reason to visit and index your site. Make a commitment to provide daily, optimized content and your traffic will soar.

Tip #3 Procure valuable and relevant incoming links

The more websites which link to your webpages the more valuable search engines perceive you to be, though not all links are created equal. Search engines give more leverage to links from sites which are popular and credible and from sites which are relevant to your website topic.

There are different types of links.

- A direct link looks like a basic website address, for example, www.yourwebsite.com

- A text link occurs when the webpage address is embedded in the text. Readers simply click on the link and are redirected to a new website page.

- If the link is to an internal web page, for example an article published on a website, rather than the home page, it is called a “deep link.”

You can encourage linking to your website by:

• Adding content to your site.
• Submitting to article directories.
• Publishing press releases.
• Blogging and participating in social networking forums, chat rooms and social networking sites.

Tip #4 Be Social!

Now more than ever before, internet marketing is about building a community. Whether you offer a forum on your website or you participate in social networking sites, social networking is a valuable traffic generating tactic. Sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for generating links and traffic to your site – create a profile and then post comments, links to your site and ideas which generate conversation.

Get involved – many chat rooms and forums are industry specific, find those which cater to your industry, and begin participating. Speak to and connect with a highly targeted audience.

Tip #5 Advertise for more exposure and traffic

Advertising, when handled strategically, can be used to promote your content and products or services. PPC advertising is often the tool of choice because you control the advertising budget on a daily basis and have the tools to test and track your advertising efforts. Once you’ve honed your PPC ads the return on investment can be phenomenal in terms of traffic and purchases.

For maximum results, create a traffic and SEO strategy. Outline your plan and your goals and then take the necessary action. Take advantage of these five traffic and search engine tips to boost your business.