How effective is your website marketing strategy? If it doesn’t include all the essentials, you may need to rethink things. Otherwise, you risk leaving traffic on the table.

I’ve outlined three important concepts below that you should inject into your website marketing plan. Using any one of these will enhance your efforts, but combining them yields much more power.

1. Leverage — Leverage allows you to magnify the power of your efforts. You can use the power of article directories, for example, to rank higher in the search engines than you could otherwise. Article directories also build links without any additional effort on your part. Submit your article once, and it continues to work for you.

One of the best ways to use leverage is to spread your content around on various powerful sites. This allows you to increase your reach, get the attention of the search engines, and rank higher. Using article sites, Squidoo, and other user generated content Web properties help you reach new markets and create valuable backlinks to your site.

2. Diversification — The more you diversify your sources of traffic, and the keywords your site is found for, the more stable your free traffic becomes. As website owners, we often spend too much time trying to rank high in the search engines for keywords with a lot of demand and competition. We all know that if we can accomplish that, we’ll get lots of free website traffic.

For more stable free traffic, however, it’s sometimes best to rank for a diversified set of easier to win for keywords. In fact, the larger the number of keywords your site ranks for, the more stable the traffic will be. For this reason alone, diversifying your keywords should be a key result of your website marketing strategy.

Building more Web pages is one way to diversify. Having additional pages will result in an increase in internal links, more PageRank, and your site being found for more keywords. Another way to diversify is to create more links on other websites, especially in conjunction with substantial content. This will expand your free traffic sources.

3. Automation — Automation can free up your time, create leverage, and help you diversify. Using software is one way to take advantage of automation. You can use software to create links, make article or directory submissions, and research new topics for your website.

If you feel your website marketing strategy is failing you, evaluate it and make sure you’re taking full advantage of diversification, leverage, and automation. If you don’t have enough inpointing links, diversify your efforts. If you aren’t leveraging other websites to build your business, create additional content on more powerful sites. If you aren’t automating, then start doing so. Making small changes in these areas can lead to big changes in terms of more free traffic.