What if you build your own website and nobody visits? Well, unless you take active steps, just such a scenario is likely. There are literally billions of websites floating around cyberspace; finding yours is like finding a needle on Mars. But you can work to build website traffic with great success if you know how. We’ll give you some ideas.

Legacy Domain: If you bought an expired domain name that once had good traffic, you are already ahead of the game. So if you haven’t picked out a name yet, you would do well to educate yourself on the domain-reselling industry. In a nutshell, when website owners stop paying for their sites’ domain names, they become available for resale, either by a domain reseller or at auction (for more valuable domain names). GoDaddy.Com and Register.Com are examples of domain resellers. Your task is to find out which domains with suitable names are coming up for sale and check their former traffic volume – you’d like at least 1500 visitors a week. Upcoming sales can be found at sites such as NameJet.Com, and you can research previous traffic history at RegisterCompass.Com.

Search Engine Optimization: A grab-bag of techniques centered on improving your website’s placement in search results. You need to decide on a few keywords (actually keyphrases) that you will use and reuse throughout your website. Google Adwords Search Tool let’s you know how many weekly searches involved your keywords. You would like highly popular keywords that don’t have a lot of competition from different websites. The Search Tool will tell you all this and more. The other important aspect of SEO is backlinks. This is where websites with high Google PageRank scores (four and above) have a link to your website. With enough backlinks, the effect will be to raise your PageRank! You can arrange this by submitting articles and blogs to such sites and placing a backlink to your website in the material you submit. You can also arrange to have backlinks inserted into existing articles; site owners usually charge $55 to $75 a month for such links.

Social Media: You can also use social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to get traffic to your site. Tweets, blogs, profiles and forums are but some of the ways you can exploit social media sites. You can also make videos about your site and put them on YouTube. You can promote your website on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious by writing articles and blogs.

Build a website, follow these practices and before long you will start to see your readership rise.