Once you’ve built your website, the next question on your mind will almost certainly be how to get traffic to it.

After all, if no-one except you looks at your website, there wasn’t really much point in making it (unless you’re a vanity publisher obviously).

So, how can you get traffic to your site?

Google works by taking notice of a number of things but one of those is the number of links pointing back to your site.

You can’t get that information directly from Google so you have to either use the referral logs in your analytics package or a third party service like Majestic SEO or Ahrefs.

Or you can do like I do and assume that so long as you’re building decent quality links (not spammy ones), Google will likely find them. So I don’t personally recommend that you spend much – if any – time checking whether your backlinks have been indexed.

Just continue the ongoing process of getting links.

Some links will send traffic directly to your site. These can include articles at sites like EzineArticles, videos at sites like YouTube and links from any forums that you’re a regular contributor to. They can also include profile links at popular sites like LinkedIn and links from any Tweets or Facebook messages you send out.

Those type of links are likely to send you some traffic.

And if you don’t want to create the written content yourself, you can use sites like iWriter to get it written for you (or at least get a reasonable first draft so you’re not staring at a blank screen).

How much traffic depends on a lot of factors.

Sometimes you just “hit a nerve” and traffic appears as if by magic.

Other times it seems as though whatever you did sank without trace the second you hit the “publish” key.

Unfortunately, you never know ahead of time whether you’ll hit one of those extremes or somewhere in between them.

If you did, you’d be rich beyond your wildest dreams as you’d only ever put up successful links that sent tons of traffic and buyers to your website.

All you can do is monitor the things you do that send you traffic and do your best to do more of the same.

But it’s really important not to get stuck in analysis paralyis mode.

It’s far better to spend your time doing a bit of analysis – maybe 5 or 10 minutes – and then actually do something that stands a good chance of getting someone to visit your site.

The other main trick is to do something regularly.

Google takes notice of how often you update your site and adjusts how often it crawls round based on that information. It’s why big sites like the BBC, CNN YouTube and Wikipedia get crawled and indexed almost immediately whereas your site and mine get crawled less often.

I’m not suggesting that you need to operate at the scale of those sites – that’s beyond most budgets – but I am suggesting that you regularly add content to your site and links pointing back to it.

Content could be a simple blog post – a few hundred words is fine. Just make it worthwhile for your visitors to read it.

If you’re stuck for ideas, set yourself up a Google Alert or two and use the titles that come through for inspiration.

And it’s often worth setting up an email newsletter. The service I use is called Aweber and they’re reliable, easy to use and helpful if you get stuck. Sending out an email newsletter once a month can keep traffic coming back to your site and all you need to do is write a post or write about something topical and then send out a message about it.

This keeps you top of mind and also encourages people to come back to your website which means extra traffic.

And if you’d like more help with getting traffic to your website, check out this page.

Or if you’d like to know about more real world ways to get traffic, click here.