Today there was a short seminar on how to increase traffic to personal websites. It was very short but had some useful points to remember.
The main way to get a lot of traffic is to have a website with a clear purpose in the first place. Use the 'rule of three' (3 personal strengths, 3 methods of advertising, 3 mediums of advertising) to establish this.
It is also incredibly important to make sure that your website appears high in search rankings. To do this, its important to ensure that the keywords are accurate on the web page's META tags. It's best to find a niche market and use words that represent that for the META tags.
Finally, it helps to have other websites linking to your website. This is one of the criteria Google uses to determine rankings and it will help a lot if people are actually using those links to find your site.
Personally, I must make sure that I think through the purpose of my personal website clearly, find a niche to appeal to and make sure my website is promoted through other websites. I could do this by putting my URL wherever I can (facebook, myspace, forums, anything with a profile opportunity).
