This is part 4 of my series on building my first website using HostGator. It is intended to show other people who are thinking of building their first site how easy it is and why HostGator is such a good option for a hosting company. In this article we look at an aspect of building a website that a lot of people never consider, getting traffic to your site. It may come as a surprise to learn that HostGator can really help you with this.

I will be completely honest and say that when I made the decision to build a website for my small business in never happened to me to wonder how I would get traffic. I did not know anything about search engine optimization of pay advertising, I just assumed that if I built a site people would find it. This of course is completely untrue, fortunately HostGator has offered a great deal of help in getting traffic to my site.

The most important thing that HostGator offers to help get traffic to your website is lessons on search engine optimization. They actually offer lessons on everything that you could possibly need to know about building and running a website but the ones on SEO have proven to be the most useful. These lessons are easy to follow and will take you from the basics right through to a very advanced level. I am still at an intermediate level so I can not really comment on how good the advanced lessons are but the beginner ones are excellent.

One of the things that you will find as you learn about SEO is that a lot of the work that is involved is quite tedious. Fortunately HostGator offers a lot of tools to make it easier. A lot of these tools would be quite expensive if you had to buy them on your own, HostGator includes them free with all hosting plans. The most beneficial of the tools are the ones that allow you to analyze your site to see where improvements could have made that will help you to rank better.

While search engine optimization is a great way to get visitors to your site it is probably not the best option, in most cases pay per click advertising will get you more traffic and more importantly better traffic. As I researched the subject however I became a bit worried because of all the stories you hear about people who lost a lot of money running PPC campaigns. This turned out not to be issue since HostGator includes a hundred dollar AdWords credit with all of their hosting plans. This allowed me to learn how to use without having to risk any of my own money.

Source by Drew Graham