While creating a website is an excellent idea, it won’t help you much if you no one sees it. That means you’ll need to promote it, which we’ll cover in upcoming entries. But even when not promoting your website, there are ways to drive visitors (aka as “traffic”) to it.

To get visitors to your website, you want it to have a high “page rank.” When anyone enters words into a search engine, a list of potential websites that might meet their needs pops up. If your website is among the first 10 listed, you’ve got an incredibly high page rank. If your site doesn’t show up until the 20th page of listings, you’ve got a really low page rank. You objective is to ensure your website gets closer to the first 10 listed than to the 200th entry. Doing so greatly increases the odds that someone conducting an Internet search will then go to your website (as opposed to someone else’s site, as they also may be selling a book with the same topic or in the same genre as you).

One of the quickest ways to improve in page rankings is to get links to your website. There are a variety of ways to do that, but they’ll require a concerted effort on your part. You should be able to links to your site through:
• Other bloggers – Offer to swap links with other bloggers. If you wrote a book about beer, a link to your blog would be great on a beer lover’s blog (and vice versa!).
• Press release distribution sites – Send a press release to distribution sites that will post it (and probably a link to your website) online. You press release probably won’t result in media attention simply because it’s been posted, but you’re really only interested in the link.
• Social review sites – These websites post visitor-written reviews of businesses, products and public facilities. There are a number of book-related social review sites where you can set up a page about your tome and yourself.
• Directory sites – Some sites list links to various businesses. If you do consulting related to your book, get your name with a link to your website posted on them.
• Event listings – Should you have a book signing/reading or other appearance, post it on various event listings for the community where your appearance is planned. Include a link to your website.
• Answer board sites – You’re an expert on the topic you wrote about (or if a novelist, you’re now an expert on writing), so share your expertise and experiences on answer boards related to your subject area. As part of your signature, include a link to your website.
• Video listings – The biggest driver to most websites are videos posted on YouTube. Create some videos in which you tell about your book or discuss the subject that you just wrote about. Clicking on the video sends people to your website where there’s a video feed.

In addition to creating links all over the web, submit your site to as many search engines as you can. This will ensure that the various search engines out there actually know about and list your website. For the larger search engine houses, such as Google, you probably won’t have to do anything as your site automatically will be listed within days of going live.

Another way of driving traffic to your website is through Search Engine Optimization, which we’ll discuss in an upcoming entry.