Best way to get visitors to your website

The main objective of having any website on the net is to be found by visitors.
To do this a webmaster must have a well thought out link building and web promotion
campaign.
Firstly most visitors or traffic will come from search engines so if your
website is not known or indexed by search engines for all intent and purpose your
website does not exist. Search engines or spiders follow links, this is how websites
are found and indexed, so start by submitting your website to both free and paid
web directories , directories are spidered by search engines and are great for building your search engine ranking and your backlinks.

Advertising and branding your website, buying text links, banner ads, PPC, adwords, these are sure ways of getting your site in front of visitors and thus driving traffic to your web page/s

Submit your website or blogs to social networking sites such as digg, technorati etc.

Submit your feeds to web feeders so visitor can subscribe to them and since feeds only provide summaries or brief titles visitors or subscribers will have to come to your site to read or find your product, service or information.

Joining webmaster forums or any forum relating to your website and taking an active
part in discussions and topics is another way of building links and bringing visitors in.

Leaving well thought out comments to topics on blogs, will provide enough curiosity to get a click back to your web page.

All of the above should be part of promoting and increasing backlinks. Incoming links is the back bone in any website success, the more quality, high PR websites you have
linking to your site, the better your link popularity and pagerank and thus more visitors.

What type of Internet portal is best for promoting your work: A website or a blog?

Is the money you pour into maintaining a personal website worth it compared to having a blog? Last year I was in a position to answer that question. I had a website and a blog. Now I have blogs, in the plural.

I had fallen for the oft vaunted wisdom that you must have a website to have a professional web presence. Without your own website and domain name, you are a nonentity. It was the old argument over public email addresses and private ones again. How could you be taken seriously as a professional without a personal email and a website.

In a word, nonsense. I've had both and they made no difference whatsoever. In fact I have heard from editors who use public email services like Yahoo. As for the benefits of having a website, with your own exclusive domain name, I found none.

My website was not doing me any favors, and the crunch came when my website host doubled the fees. I debated for a while - after all, the website was under my own name, and that domain may be lost to me if I gave it up. But in the end, I dumped the website. It just wasn't economically viable, and besides, blogs get more attention.

I am not sure why this is so - perhaps it is because people like the more informal style of a blog, and can't be bothered navigating websites. Websites are the very devil to keep consistent. They look different on different browsers, art images can be tricky (and do look its at 72 dpi although it loads faster), and writer's websites, in particular, are difficult to make look sharp and interesting.

On the other hand, a well made blog attracts visitors - actually, even blogs that aren't so well made attract visitors, if they are interested in the theme. For example, Blogger blogs are pretty much of a muchness, but Carol Gillott's Paris Breakfasts is a very popular blog that successfully showcases her work. It's the theme that draws her fans - including me! Her love of all things Parisienne - especially the delicacy known as macarons - makes for a lovely blog that you just have to keep revisiting.

Would Paris Breakfasts work as well if it were a website? Well, the choice is with Carol and she chose a blog.

Websites are often touted over blogs because they can be set up to allow a visotor to navigate around the site, but the latest blogs offer even more user friendly options.

For example, Wordpress, which I now use, can be set up just like a website, with a static welcome page and site navigation. The backgrounds are very cool, and the blogs look good. There is also considerable creative scope, just as there is with a website. The blog can be any style or theme you choose.

Better still, if you are the kind of eclectic pack rat who dabbles in almost everything, blogs can cover all our interests and business ventures. having several websites would be prohibitively costly - but you can create as many free blogs as you have the time. Blogs are also a good free way to experiment with ideas, and then, if you really must, you can create a website knowing it has been tried and tested.

In short, I found no real benefit in having a website, except the domain name. It made no difference when I dumped it - I still sell my work, and don't need a website to do that. But my blogs are a different story - they are giving me a web presence and a place to tell my stories, share my experiences and experiment with my creativity. All that helps promote my work without the unnecessary expense of a website.

What type of Internet portal is best for promoting your work: A website or a blog?

The pat answer is: It depends on you and your business. No, really. Blogs and websites come with their own pros and cons, and you'll want to weigh them before deciding. For most situations, however, a website is the best bet. Here's why:

1. Websites are more flexible
Blog are easy to update and maintain, which is part of their appeal, but websites can have equally sophisticated and user-friendly content management systems. Blogs give readers a way to leave comments, but there's no reason why a website can't have similar features. Websites can be as simple or complex as you want them to be.

At first glance, blogs can seem just as diverse as websites. But for the most part, they all follow the same format: A blog is a series of posts listed in chronological order. The first thing you see when you visit a blog is the latest post. There are usually sidebars filled with links to older posts. Some blogs have static pages that live outside the chronological format, but blogs are still basically online journals. Regardless of how you dress the blog up, that's the format you're stuck with.

2. Websites are less demanding
Regardless of whether you have a blog or website, you'll want to keep it fresh and give people a reason to come back. Even so, it's less critical to update a website on a regular basis. Blogs by their very nature need fresh content all the time. Without a new post every day, or at least every week, blogs get stale and musty. You'll either have to spend a few hours every day writing articles for your blog, or you'll need to hire someone else to handle that job for you. And frankly, there are some businesses that are very hard to write fascinating news articles about on a continual basis.

3. Websites are more professional
Although blogs are gaining preeminence on the internet, a blog will still have the feel of an online journal. Blogs tend to be more casual and conversational. Depending on your business, a blog could set the perfect tone for your web presence. But in almost all cases, you simply can't go wrong with a basic website.

4. You can always add a blog later
In some cases, businesses have both a website and a blog. The two entities can complement each other nicely. The website usually serves as the official store front for whatever services or products the business offers, while the blog is the place where people go to read up on the latest news about the business. So when in doubt, go with a website first. Once you've had your website for a while, you'll be in a better position to know whether or not a blog will enhance your business.