What are the best free ways to draw traffic to your retail web site?

[Donna]

[manu king]

There are many methods. The best way that I recommend is through SEO, where u can get unlimited free organic traffic from major search engine like Google. However this will take sometimes and effort before you see the result.
Here are the 2 website that you can check on how to do it.

[James Poon]

There are many best free ways to draw traffic to your retail web site.
Professional Webmasters Advice have always been the same.
The once tightly sealed secret has been shared among their peers.
Strategies/tips/ways/methods =
(1) Provide a solution to a problem.
(2) Design your website, integrate with online payment gateway.
(3) Duplicate your effort with affiliate program.
(4) Create more online presence by promoting/publicizing it at:-
(4.1) Search engines,
(4.2) Blogs,
(4.3) Forums,
(4.4) Social networking sites,
(4.5) Press Release Sites,
(4.6) Slide Sites,
(4.7) Link exchange program or backlink services,
and Last but not least, the
(4.8) Free Classifieds Directory or Free Community Classifieds.
You may ask me why? Well, classifieds can be a place to post free ads.
The benefits are many. First it can be free. Next, your website can be easily picked up by search engines.
Your website can be easily indexed by especially Google and other smarter search engines that sent spiwer to crawl the web.
And if you place your url link at top 10 websites that get regularly updated (daily), you website gets picked up in the fastest time.
And also your website can gain better search engine ranking since you are linked to these top 10 classified sites.
Creating brand awareness, getting web traffic and higher ranking takes time, long term planning, hard work and consistent efforts.

Try to google with the following keywords and you will find a good top 10 list of classified websites out there.
Use these keywords when you do your search in the search engines:-
Biggest Classifieds
Best Classifieds
Best Online Classifieds
Free Classifieds Directory
Free Community Classifieds
Community Classifieds
Free Ads UK (if you are targeting UK market as well)
Post Free Ads

If it is internet business or online business related, use the following keywords during your search online:-
Make Money Classifieds
Online Business Classifieds
Internet Business Classifieds
Internet Business 24 Hours
Best MLM Classifieds
MLM Prelaunch

[Reza Prasetyo]

The simplest way to bring traffic to your site is to use PPC (pay per click) advertising. If you have a budget to work with this is an excellent way to instantly bring visitors to your website. If you are interested in PPC advertising then you will most likely want to use Google Adwords. As a bonus, if you are a first time Google Adwords customer then you are able to take advantage of an excellent $100 Adwords credit GoDaddy gives you every time you open a hosting account with them. Using that $100 credit is an excellent way to see if an Adwords campaign is right for you.

And second method is to use general SEO techniques
You should focus on the following techniques for your main SEO strategy:
1. On Page SEO - Optimize your on-page content to reflect your carefully chosen keywords
==\> Titles, headers, keyword density, tags, quality outbound links, etc...

2. Off Page SEO - Link building (One way link building in particular)
An extremely important aspect in search engine optimization is link building. One way link building is the best link building method and should be your top priority. This is where your website link appears on someone else's site. Google likes to see links to your niche market site from various other relevant sites. All sites are not created equal however. Not only does Google like to see sites linking back to your site, but those websites must also be relevant and authoritative sites. One backlink from a reputable and popular site is worth more than one hundred backlinks from shady lesser known sites. This is include articles marketing, social networking, social bookmarking, directory submission, etc.

And remember to always use whitehat SEO technique if you don't want to get your site banned
Hope this help you

[Sam Little]

Here are methods I use to drive traffic to my sites. They seem to work for me but I won't lie, they require a little effort. With a retail site you may want to check out the article on auction and trading sites. Best of luck to you.

http://hubpages.com/hub/5-Easy-Ways-To-I...te-Traffic
http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Use-Tradi...te-Traffic
http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Use-Yahoo...-Your-Blog