Okay, you’ve secured web hosting, gotten a great looking site built and uploaded, and are all set to start reaping the benefits of all your hard work, when you look around and realize, “Hey, no one’s coming here yet.” Never fear, a solution is at hand and while this hydra of web traffic can be many-headed, that only increases the likelihood that your site will find some of it. Let’s look at the beginning stages of securing traffic for your new hosted website.

Keywords – This is a bedrock foundation of your site. A sound keyword plan will help you create relevant content, and also help the search engines figure out exactly what your site is about.

Site Structure – Hopefully this was well thought out during creation, and you have a site that is well organized, keyword optimized, and make sense to your visitors. If your intent is to be an authority site on hummingbirds, having pages on your site about other, unrelated topics won’t help. Worse yet, would be to have affiliate landing pages interspersed with your site, especially for unrelated products.

Sitemap – Creating and submitting a Google sitemap will help in having the search engines understand exactly what your site is about, and could aid in getting pages indexed.

Submissions – Submitting your site to the search engines (though not Google: they like to find it all by themselves, and they’re good at it!) can help. You can realize significant traffic from these other sources.

Social Media Marketing – Having the ability for others to bookmark your site’s pages and posts, as well as utilizing the social media outlets yourself is a marvelous way to get your site noticed. This is a brave Web 2.0 world, and getting out there in the midst of it and being a contributor can only help!

Links: Inbound and Outbound – Ultimately rankings are a popularity contest, and sites with more inbound links win. It also helps to link out to interior pages of your site, as well as to authority sites in your niche.

Paid Traffic – You can always start a pay per click campaign to help get some initial visits to your site. Be careful here though, as it’s very easy to waste a good deal of money!

Content Pointing To Your Site – This is where you utilize things like article directories, Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, social media profiles, and more to have related content with keyword rich anchor text links pointing to your web pages. A great way to not only get traffic, but also build link popularity.

Press Releases – If your business warrants the use of a press release, by all means use them. It’s a great way to get your company’s story in front of a large number of people quickly.

Videos – Creative and imaginative use of videos can create virtual calling cards that can go viral and deliver hordes of visitors to your site.

These are but a few of the ways that you can go about generating some traffic to your newly created website. One of the keys to this is some degree of perseverance, so whichever methods you decide to employ, stick with them long enough to give it a chance to work.