The key term here is consistency. Having consistent traffic coming to your site is a lot harder than having a lot of traffic come to your site, or having a short burst of traffic. Consistent traffic takes a lot more planning and hard work. The trouble is that many people are fooled by rogue SEO companies. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and the companies that deal with it will promise to have your website ranked higher up the Search Engine Results Pages (the SERPs).

The rogue SEO companies will receive payment and get a website on the first few pages of Google. The customer is thrilled, only to find out two months later that their website has fallen down to result number two million, or worse still, the website has been banned from indexing by the search engines. In this case the customer will have no way of getting their money back, or claiming reparations for having their websites kicked off of the search engines.

Getting higher traffic numbers is easy

The SEO companies may use Black Hat SEO, which are SEO techniques that break the search engines rules. They work in getting websites ranked highly, but are usually punished within two months (on Google). Even without Black Hat SEO, a business may get their website ranked highly and increase their traffic numbers for a short while.

Ways a website may get higher numbers of temporary-traffic

1 – An advertising campaign
This can be done via emails, leaflets, posters, TV, Radio, etc. It drives lots of traffic for a short period of time whilst the adverts are running.

2 – A PPC campaign
This is a program where you pay to have people look at your website. Your adverts run on other websites and search engines. When someone clicks on your advert and looks at your website, you will have to pay the person who hosts your advert. This will gain you more temporary traffic whilst the campaign is running.

3 – Black Hat SEO
This involves things such as spamming links that point to your site. It involves keyword stuffing, posting duplicate content as your own, etc. It has an initial positive effect, but this effect is removed when you are caught (for want of a better word) by the search engines.

4 – A viral campaign
Some content/emails/adverts may go viral online and be passed around by a lot of people. As they are being passed around, they will attract attention to the origin website (if you are smart enough to have put your web address in the viral content).

5 – A social media campaign
Some people are going to take note if you run a good social media campaign. Your traffic will increase as you gain support online, but it will only last for as long as your profile is the more current trendy or new thing. Often a social media campaign is a flash in the pan exercise.

Ways of getting a more consistent flow of traffic

1 – Time
If you keep your website online for a long time, and update it frequently throughout that time, the search engines will view you in a better light and will start raising your website up through the search engine results.

2 – Updates
Keeping the website updated is a good way of rising through the SERPs. The updates are viewed as good things by search engines, and older information and web tools are not as useful to website visitors. A website that is kept up to date is more useful to viewers.

3 – Strong links
These are links from websites and content that is related to the page it points towards. They are also links that are not going t break after a few months. The longer a link points to your website, the better off you will be.

4 – Consistently high quality
This helps you to rise up through the SERPs, and will keep people coming back, since they are not going to return to a low quality website on mass.

5 – Easy to use websites
The harder your website is to use then the more people you are going to scare away. This does not mean that you need to host a website for the dumb portion of the population. You can make your website as complex as you like, but you will need to make it easy to learn, and therefore easy to use.

6 – Websites that are well internally and externally linked
Good internal links will help people remain on your website for longer so that they bond with it more. It will also help the search engines index your website correctly. Linking out to other people will help your SEO and usability if the links are to related sites/content. Links pointing in to your website will drive direct traffic to you, and will increase your websites SEO value.

7 – A good on-page SEO foundation
Every part of your on-page SEO must be completed. This includes keywords and descriptions in meta tags, good quality content, easy to read links with keywords, etc. Your websites traffic growth will be forever stunted if you fail with your on-page SEO.