Top Ten Ways To Increase Website Traffic
One of the most difficult things for people starting their own website is to build traffic. For a first time web publisher it can be a very frustrating process to get more visitors. At times, it can seem almost hopeless. The hardest part of it all is knowing what to do. If you are in that boat, here are ten great tips to build more website traffic:
10
Have patience
Building website traffic takes time. It won’t happen overnight. This site was online for nearly six month before we saw a significant amount of daily traffic. If you have an interesting website over time the word about your site will spread and you will gain more visitors. Also the longer your website has been around the more it will be seen as an authority on the subjects you present.
9
Post often
Websites that have more frequent and regular posting schedules tend to develop an audience quicker. It also signals to search engines that the site is active and isn’t outdated. It is considered ideal, if possible, to post content roughly every 5 hours on average. Of course this isn’t a possibility for every site out there, but for many it is.
8
Blog commenting
A great way of increasing traffic to your site is by posting comments on blogs. If you contribute something meaningful to the conversation and don’t just spam your site’s URL, it will likely be approved by the blog moderator and is an easy way to improve visibility to your site to readers who may not have ever thought about visiting your site before. It is recommended to post on blogs or articles that are similar in topic to something you have posted about to make sure your comment is seen as relevant to the conversation.
7
Every time you post new content to your site, get in the habit of also posting it to Twitter. The key is to make sure that you utilize the right hash tags and make the Tweet interesting enough to make people want to click on it. If properly executed, Twitter is a great way of increasing traffic to your site and gaining new visitors. Often times people will search on certain hashtags to find Tweets about something that interests them. If you can provide a compelling reason to click on your link within the 160 character limit, you are well on your way to adding to your daily traffic numbers.
6
Nowadays it is incredibly easy to create a Facebook fan page. In fact, the fan page for this site was setup in under 5 minutes. In this day and age, it is almost a necessity for an organization to have a presence on Facebook. Most people will expect you have a page. To build fans it helps to post things that are interesting and entice people to share it. A popular way of doing this is by posting funny or interesting graphics. If executed properly Facebook is an excellent platform to broadcast to the world what you are writing.
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5
Forum posting
Posting in forums about topics relevant to your site will greatly add to the visibility of your site. The key to this approach is to make sure your forum posts are well-thought out and utilize proper grammar and spelling. If you fail to take these steps, people will not take your site seriously and probably won’t click on a link. As an alternative to forums, another great place to gain exposure is through question and answer websites such as Yahoo! Answers, Wiki.Answers.com, and many others out there. You can reference your own website as a source for answering other people’s questions. Just make sure you back up your claims with valid facts so people don’t see your site as a sham.
4
Guest blogging
By guest blogging and posting on other websites you will gain a reputation within the blogging community. If the article is well-written, informative, and concise people will respect your site and want to read more of what you have to offer. Additionally, by guest posting you will get a backlink back to your own site. This is a vital means of adding to your search engine rankings and needs to be a part of your overall SEO strategy. The more backlinks you have, the more your site appears to be a definitive source on the niche you are focusing on. The majority of blogs are pretty receptive to the idea of guest blogging as it benefits you both. For the blog it adds to their content and drives their own traffic and for you it provides a link back to your site and your content.
3
Article marketing
A great way of improving your website’s traffic is to post various articles to article directories. This will help people interested in certain articles and content find your website more easily. There are number of websites like Ezine, Article Dashboard, and many others which make it very easy to submit content. The nice thing about article marketing is you only have to write an article once, but can publish it to a number of different directories.
2
Use the right keywords
Using the right keywords can be almost as important as the content itself. For some keywords, there is a large number of competitors which will make it unlikely for your site to appear in search results. For others, conveying the same meaning, there aren’t as many sites competing for hits. You just have to be careful and do your research to make sure the alternate keywords are still ranked high in search appearances. This is where proper use of SEO analytic tools comes in handy. By using these tools you can reach for what many people in the industry call “low lying fruit.”
1
Post great content
Nothing is more important that posting great and unique content. If you don’t have something worth reading, no matter what others strategies you employ to build traffic, nobody will want to visit your site. If you have enough great content traffic will eventually grow on its own. The more content you have out there the more likely it is that someone will find your site. As a general rule of thumb, most posts are recommended to be at least 1000 characters in length. If you use a platform like WordPress, it will keep track of the number of characters for you. If not, you can always use a word processing program to tell you how many characters are in your post. Remember, ultimately you want readers, not just page views.
Featured Image: Flickr by Blake Petterson
