Contributed by: Mark Gottlieb, a marketing professional who blogs at: Mark the Marketer.

Back in the 1990s, promoting your company website was relatively easy. You simply placed ‘meta tags’ on the top of your home page and submitted the page to free search engines or directories. With literally hundreds of millions of websites on the internet today and the quantity continuing to grow at a rapid rate, it is crucial to come up with proven and innovative ways to drive traffic to your company website on a continuous basis. I have listed 46 that come to mind. The growing importance of website marketing for maximizing company profits has resulted in a new group of marketing rock stars: digital marketers and even the chief digital officers.

Without further ado, here are 46 ways to drive traffic to your website:

1. Start with a strong, solid business foundation. This encompasses designing a business plan, marketing plan, and ideal client profile and 30-second elevator speech.

2. Post videos including how to videos on your own company YouTube channel. Reference your website URL in the videos.

3. Be consistent and ‘brand’ your company. Use the same colors, logo, etc. everywhere on your website. Perform QA on the website when making updates for proper branding.

4. Make your website trustworthy by implementing trust building policies: top-notch customer service, a code of ethics and a newsletter privacy policy build trust.

5. Ask your webmaster to name each of your pages using a keyword you have supplied him/her with.

6. Offer added values on your website that make sense to your business and target market/s. This can include affiliate programs, books, and recommended links to websites.

7. Add a ‘favorites’ or ‘bookmark this site’ script to some of your website pages.

8. Add a ‘Recommend This Site’ on your website. If someone visits your website and knows someone else who may like it, this feature will e-mail the page’s link to a recipient.

9. If you have pages you update monthly on your website (such as products, an articles page or recommended links page), mention this on the page.

10. Participate in a few Web rings and connect your site with other sites in your niche. For additional information, visit WebRing and Bravenet.

11. Provide an e-mail subscription box, to your e-zine or business announcement list, on your most viewed website pages.

12. Create a newsletter. Ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, and encourage them to send it along to people they know. Send a newsletter regularly with teasers or lead-ins to your in-depth new articles or with special offers and the latest products.

13. Give away free items. Offer something on your website that people want. Give them a reason to come back and get more. Offer free downloads and update them regularly. Offer coupons or discounts. Content is definitely king.

14. On more content rich websites, create a ‘What’s New’ page and consider asking your web designer to design a ‘Site Map‘ for your visitors.

15. Make sure your website is ‘search engine friendly’. Search engines look for certain things such as titles, headings, and meta tags so this is crucial.

a. Title tags: Title tags should be approximately 60 characters and should include some keywords.

b. Header tags are numbered from 1 to 7: some search engines recognize header tags, so be sure to use these tags for each of the titles on your page.

c. Keyword Meta tags: Add no more than 15 to 20 keywords to keep the search engines from flagging your site for keyword spamming. Prioritize your words. The best way to submit to search engines is to submit to each search engine individually.

d. Use keywords in the text area of each page. They are especially important at the beginning of sentences and higher up on the page.

e. To learn more about meta tags and choosing keywords, read How to Choose Your Meta Tag Keywords by David Carter

16. Search engines do not find your site unless you submit your site’s information to them. Below are ways to submit your website to search engines:

a. Get listed in search engines by submitting your website to all major search engines. Even though it is time consuming, it is often recommended to submit to key search engines individually.

b. Submit your site to get it listed in all the major web directories. This will generate traffic directly from the directories themselves and will also help to improve your link popularity. That helps you win on Google.

c. Utilize a search engine submission service or program. Two good search engine submission services are Submit Express and Scrub The Web. You can also pay for a program that will assist you to submit and critique your site such as WebPosition.

d. Lastly you can hire an expert Internet Marketer or Search Engine Optimization as a member of your staff or as a consultant to handle your search engine submissions. Your goal should be to come up high on search engine results when people search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.

17. Visit these search engine information sites: Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Guide to keep up with search engine technology.

18. Find easy and secure ways for your clients to pay you. A shopping cart with an SSL certificate and a secure way to accept checks and/or credit cards such as Paypal work very well.

19. Check your business web site’s links regularly to make sure they all work. Use a free link checker such as Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

20. Provide monthly chats or online bulletin boards (forums) on your website or linked to your website to build relationships and community.

21. Conduct periodic contests (e.g. photo contest or essay on how I used your product or service) and announce the winners on your site. Stage regular giveaways and spread the word about it.

22. Offer a free e-book or e-report (e.g. white paper) on your site. The size doesn’t matter if you’re providing it for free and it’s specifically tailored for your ideal client. Provide permission for the e-book to be forwarded to others for their personal use.

23. Design some quizzes or surveys. Surveys can be created for free on SurveyMonkey. Statistics show that visitors love quizzes and assessment tools.

24. Participate in online forums including LinkedIn groups as an expert in areas related to your business. You get to ‘quietly’ promote your business in your three or four line signature. Leave insightful comments, and people will click on your profile, and then visit your website. However, spamming unrelated areas is not recommended. Participation should be content oriented and not just a sales pitch.

25. Place your business web site address on all your printed literature — business cards, brochures, newsletters, letterhead, e-mail signature, license plates, signage, ads, paint it on your business vehicles – Buy newspaper and yellow pages ads with your URL. Put up flyers and stickers. For businesses that want to promote locally, sponsor a local youth sports team. Do anything and everything to spread the word.

26. Promote your web address in your signature for e-mails (change it regularly to highlight something new you’re promoting).

27. Teach classes or speak to groups about subjects relating to your products.

28. Network locally to bring people to your site.

29. Get links to your site. Get people with complementary sites link to yours. If you offer real estate closing services, ask a local realtor and others to link to you and offer a reciprocal to link to them. Links lead to clicks onto your website and help to improve your search engine rankings.

30. Buy sponsored links on other websites. That means more people visiting your site, and many sites offer a pay for performance model.

31. Buy banner ads on other websites. This helps to build brand recognition.

32. Participate in a banner exchange program. This won’t cost you anything, and will lead to a few extra visitors. You also will be spreading your brand all over the place.

33. Pay for clicks to your site- pay for clicks or inclusion on the search engines enable people to see your site in the sponsored links section of the search results when they search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.

34. Set up an affiliate marketing program. With affiliate marketing, you can either pay per click, pay per lead generated, pay per sale, or pay per customer acquired.

35. Make public relations (PR) an integral part of your web traffic building strategy. Get news coverage of your business and your site. When your launch or update your website, send a press release to the media, your clients, and friends and associates, too. Approach online and traditional media; this will often lead to others placing links pointing tomyour website, which leads to more clicks and also to improved search engine rankings. Promote to editors in your target markets in your business. Reach out to print and online editors and also TV, radio, newspapers and business news media where appropriate. Coverage can be local, national or international depending on your market.

36. Use E-mail marketing. E-mail your special offers driving traffic to your site, but also provide other useful information so you can keep the open rate up and minimize opt-outs. If your e-mails are always salesy, they could lose their impact.

37. Write articles for publication on other websites that focus on your target market and get published. The author profile will link to your site. The article will show that you’re an expert. Also submit to article banks.

38. Write articles for your own website regularly and publish yourself. This will help you to win on the search engines and gives your visitors a reason to visit your website again and again.

39. Ask for reviews. Ask for reviews of your self-published articles on other webmasters’ websites. Ask for reviews of your website, your products, your software, your services. These will usually include links to your articles. Also, reach out to influential bloggers that write about your target market.

40. Write briefs. Write daily or weekly news briefs focusing in on your industry or specialty area. This keeps your site “fresh” in the eyes of the major search engines and helps you to spread a wide net when fishing for top search engine positions.

41. Create a newsletter. Ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, and encourage them to send it along to people they know. Send out a newsletter regularly with teasers or lead-ins to your in-depth new articles or with special offers and the latest products. Concentrate on the content of your newsletter instead of flashy formatting.

42. Give awards for excellent sites in your niche. This builds more links back to your site and establishes you as a credible reviewer, an expert in your space.

43. Join your local business organizations. Chambers of Commerce and other organizations will often add your site to their member directory. That’s an added advantage over the obvious business-building and networking opportunities.

44. Create an RSS feed of your website. Give people another way to interact with your content. Subscribers to your website via RSS feed are often a receptive audience.

45. Be accessible. Build your site so that it is accessible to all browsers and on the Iphone/iPad and Android platforms. People with disabilities can be great customers, so make your site Section 508 compliant. Online tools are available to test the Section 508 compliance of the website.

46. Have a company Wikipedia page. This can drive traffic to your website and sections of your website. Visit it regularly to make sure updates from those outside your company (allowed on Wikipedia) are accurate. Wikipedia pages can be added for specific products and services.

Even if you don’t have the budget or resources to do all of the above to drive traffic to your website, doing a portion of these and doing them well should take you a long way on your quest to maximizing your website traffic.

Mark Gottlieb is an accomplished, out-of-the-box thinking marketing professional with broad digital, print, B2B, B2C, and global marketing experience, who has been known to increase campaign profits by as much as 800% during the worst economic times since the 1930s, negotiate 80% cost reductions on key lists and other costs, and develop creative tests that beat profitable controls by 50%.  To learn more visit: Mark the Marketer.