Gaining the most possible visitors to your website is only the first step in making that site successful. The other is ensuring that as many of these visitors as possible are already potentially interested in the products or services you provide. This concept is known as "targeted" traffic. Several different techniques can help you boost the amount of targeted traffic to your site.

Articles and Meta Tags

One extremely effective way to improve your search engine ranking for your niche is to write relevant, high-quality articles that link back to your website and submit them to a variety of article directories. These directories are already ranked well and offer you a way to get the attention of both search engines and potential customers. The key to success with this strategy is to offer content that the search engines already consider to be valuable and helpful. A sloppily written article that contains little solid information will not benefit your site.

To ensure that your articles are effective, you must first determine what keywords they must contain. These keywords should be the phrases or words that a person interested in your products or services would search on to find you. Next, either write articles that naturally incorporate these keywords yourself, or hire quality freelance writers to create them for you. Finally, submit these articles to various directories. Be careful that these articles are all unique as well; articles that are virtually identical to each other will not benefit your site.

You can even create a database of the articles for use in the future. Many major online retailers do this since it allows them to adjust their marketing strategies as necessary for seasonal products and semi-annual trends. Become a savvy trend follower to help you adjust your strategy as necessary, such as by tracking Twitter’s “trending keywords.” Additionally, have your webmaster list your major keywords in your site’s Meta tags. This will help ensure that search engine crawlers locate your site and boost its rankings for your niche.

Social Media

Many online businesses use social media to link to their main websites. Of course, it is true that this can be a valuable source of links to your site, and that it gives you access to the millions of members on Facebook, Twitter and similar sites. However, this is not the most significant benefit of an effective social media strategy. That benefit is simply the fact that the fans and followers you accumulate through social media already understand your business’s purpose and are already at least somewhat interested in what you provide. In short, they are targeted visitors. Simply maintaining a fan page is not enough to maximize social media’s effectiveness, however. Use your fan page to keep your followers engaged in your business and constantly reminded of its existence — but in an enjoyable and unobtrusive way. For example, simply posting updates on new products, requesting feedback on changes followers would like to see and running competitions and raffles can all help boost your targeted website traffic.

Press Releases

Press releases can also be an effective tool for drawing targeted visitors to your website, especially as your business begins to grow and develop. A press release can provide your site with a sudden burst of attention — and traffic — when you make significant changes to your business model or strategy. Releasing press releases will often be a more effective tool after your business builds a somewhat larger marketing budget, since you may need to hire a publicist company to create and submit your press releases to both on- and offline news outlets.

Of course, an effective targeted marketing strategy can incorporate many other techniques as well, but these will at least get you off on the right foot. Simply gearing your marketing funds and efforts towards targeted individuals rather than the general public can help deliver a maximized return of potential customers — not merely idle onlookers.