How To Get Traffic To Your Website: Increase Website Traffic
If you are a website or blog owner, traffic is one of the most important elements for the success of website. There are numerous ways to generate website traffic, some free, some paid. This post will focus mainly on the free ways to get or increase your website traffic.
Get Your Website to Load Faster
What do you think would happen if you had a massive traffic generation campaign but you end up referring people to a website that takes a few minutes to load? Do you think they would wait that long. Some would but I can bet most of them would not.
It is generally agreed that web surfers are a very impatient audience especially due to the great diversity of websites on the internet. So, no matter how informative your website is, you may miss the opportunity to make that first impression if your blog or website loads at snail speed. Your visitors will simply slick away and surf elsewhere. What a terrible way to lose your traffic.
While this doesn’t directly get you website traffic, it helps you to retain the visitors you have already generated.
It is also believed that Google penalizes slow loading websites or blogs. This may neutralize or diminish the impact of your search engine optimization efforts. Cutting down on the size of your graphics is one classical way to make your website load faster. It is also recommended that you specify the dimensions of your graphics to help browsers load your site faster.
If you are a blogger, then you should consider having the w3 Total Cache plugin installed. This nifty plugin will increase your blog loading speed tremendously and some bloggers have reported an increase of as much as 85%.
photo credit: Robert S. Donovan
Write great content
Great content is one of the most important magnets for attracting repeat website traffic for free. So, irrespective of any other traffic attraction techniques you use, the first important element is to focus on providing value to your website visitors.
Your website or blog should above everything else provide real value to your visitors; otherwise they will just click away within no time. As much as possible you should try to have your own unique look or approach to things while at the same time solving real problems experienced by your blog or website visitors and readers.
Get Handy Traffic Generation WordPress Plugins
If you use WordPress, then these plugins will help greatly in generating and retaining website traffic.
All in One SEO Plugin: This plugin will help you in optimizing your posts for the search engines. We have already talked about this plugin before I talked about it in a previous post called How to get more Google traffic part 2, but it is so important that it deserves yet another mention.
Google Sitemap Generator: this is a very handy sitemap plugin that submits XML sitemap of your blog posts to Google and other major search engines. Even more interesting is the fact that there is no input required on your part once you have installed this plugin. The plugin does everything automatically for you, helping your blog posts to be indexed faster by Google.
Similar Posts Plugin: This plugin is important for retaining your website visitors by providing them with more information on the topic. This plugin also refers your visitors to your older blog posts.
Add a tool or service that people need on your website
This technique is not for everyone, but it is nevertheless worth mentioning since it is a potentially explosive repeat traffic magnet.
Take the example of problogger.net; Darren Rowse has a blogging jobs board where sites looking to hire bloggers can advertise their vacancies. This is a kind of a magnet for repeat traffic. You see, people looking for blogging jobs will continually come back to this page looking for jobs. As bloggers, they are also targeted to the theme of the problogger.net blog which mostly talks about blogging.
What do you think the chances are that these job seekers will also click to the main blog? Well, you bet they are very likely. So while Darren Rowse makes money selling jobs advertisement space, he also generates repeat traffic to his blog that way.
What else would you do to generate repeat traffic to your site or blog? You can start a discussion forum and this is particularly easy to do nowadays with so many open source forum software available online today.
Give your article marketing a unique twist
Article marketing is a classic but very effective traffic generation technique. Some people argue that article marketing is not the best way to get fast website traffic on the short term.
This is especially true for the immensely competitive niches such as “internet marketing†and “making money onlineâ€. Don’t get me wrong, article marketing is still a powerful strategy but it doesn’t guarantee immediate results unless you can submit lots of article daily to the article directories.
That not withstanding, I recommend you use your creativity to leverage on the exposure provided by the article directories and give your article marketing a unique twist. How do you do this?
The first way to leverage on the power of article marketing is to write a top ten or so list of… and publish it on your blog. Then you take some first five tips or items from the list, rewrite them into about 350-500 words and submit them to article directories. In your resource box, you should then write a blurb in the line of:
To get five other tips to lose weight naturally, visit Your site
You get the point? The idea here is to promise the article reader some more tips on the exact topic he/she just read about. This will likely increase your conversion rates and increase your traffic tremendously.
Secondly, focus on writing and submitting informative articles with a unique twist as opposed to the throwaway articles that we see all over the article directories. If you write great, informative articles that solve real problems, then you increase the chances of your articles being picked up by other site owners.
A little controversy may also be very effective and we have covered this in a previous post called How to trigger the power of viral marketing in your online business. This not only increases your backlinks but also sends you free targeted traffic from such sites.
On the flip side, this technique is very much dependent on chances and you can never tell if your articles will get picked up by site owners and that brings us to the next technique to get free website or blog traffic.
Connect with other bloggers
Like we have already mentioned, getting your articles published by other bloggers and website owners is dependent upon chance and you can only hope that your articles get picked. To get your articles published on other blogs, you may submit articles to other blogs in your niche. In deed there are many blogs that accept guest posts.
You just need to make sure that the article you submit is relevant to their blog topic, are well researched and above all are useful to their readers. You also need to spell-check them and ensure that they have no grammatical and punctuation errors and you will be surprised how many blogs are willing to accept your blog posts.
Again you don’t need to focus only on the popular blogs alone. You will find the growing blogs with some decent traffic are even more willing to accept your guest posts.
Of course some site owners will not even respond to your emails. Just don’t take it personally. If you write to twenty bloggers offering to do a guest post and only receive a response from three, go ahead and submit your guest post. Repeat the same steps and before you realize your traffic will have increased threefold. This strategy alone increased traffic to my other blog by more than 120%.
Please feel free to share the traffic generation techniques that have worked for you. Just drop a comment below.
Don't be shy ;) Share your thoughts on this post by commenting below. Remember this is a DOFOLLOW blog! Also Subscribe to our rss to get future posts delivered to your inbox
These are some of the best tips to increase website traffic. Adding a tool on your website with a free download option is a very good technique to increase your traffic. i have personally experienced this thing on my website. Excellent article .
Hi Kevin. This is yet another very informative post. I think this tips will help me greatly when I start my own blog. I enjoy every single one of your post and know that you have a loyal reader right here.
I love the “write great content” suggestion. Before any blog should be promoted, there should be something worth promoting. You can drive traffic with tricks, but nobody will stay unless there is something worthy.
I am also agree. I love the “write great content†suggestion.I enjoy every single one of your post also.
It always feels good to read about strategies one can use to increase traffic. I agree, how fast the loading takes place can often keep a reader engaged but if the loading process is slow the site may very well chase the visitors away instead, personally, even I don’t like visiting sites or blogs which consumes time to load. Also, great content or evergreen content never expires and such articles even down the years creates interests in readers.
Twitter: opportplanet
says:
Content is the king as they say and is certainly the most important aspect of a high ranking in search engines and as a result to more traffic!
I fall behind in the “connect with bloggers” section. I find it really hard to create a connection with other bloggers because sometimes they just don’t want to speak with me at all or they don’t go on their site as much anymore. I have a few contacts that help me out but I could always use a couple more I suppose.
Cheap Whiteboards recently posted..Frosted Glass Whiteboard
Twitter: dayafterstore
says:
Speaking to your 1st point about impatient visitors who won’t wait for your pages to fully load, I would add that a site owner should, if possible, place his most important page elements “above the fold” (as they say); because the average site visitor is lazy, also, and is not inclined to scroll down a page if nothing caught his eye when he first landed on that page…
Sonny@Kids’ Crafts recently posted..An Optimus Prime-r- Create a Transformers Toy Gun
Twitter: dayafterstore
says:
Speaking to your 1st point about impatient visitors who won’t wait for your pages to fully load, I would add that a site owner should, if possible, place his most important page elements “above the fold” (as they say); because the average site visitor is lazy, also, and is not inclined to scroll down the page if nothing caught his eye when he first landed on that page…
Sonny@Kids’ Craft Blogs recently posted..An Optimus Prime-r- Create a Transformers Toy Gun
It is absolutely true about getting your blog or website to load faster. I personally don’t wait more than a few seconds for a page to load because I am very impatient. Thanks too for mentioning the w3 total cache plugin. While it doesn’t directly send traffic to your blog, it helps you to retain your leads and make them repeat visitors. I will have it installed in my new blog.
Many online business owners have heard of social networking but are hesitant to use it as an advertising tool because they are under the impression that these networks only cater to younger individuals.Thanks
denver seo agency recently posted..Case Study
A balance of both on-page and off-page SEO is a sure fire way to increase traffic to your website. I agree to everything mentioned in this post. Content for instance acts like a magnet to both spiders and viewers if properly written. The site’s usability also allows users to discover your website and click on the most important features you offer.
These are some good tips. I’m a small business owner and I’m trying to learn SEO as much as possible to improve my business. I’ve just installed “total cache plugin” as well as “all in one seo” (thanks to you).
But I’m struggling with backlinks though. I’m getting pretty good with blog comments but I think I should be getting links from other sources right? I plan on trying guest blogging and article marketing too.
Yes that i get a messy traffic all the time when i see the medium source in Google Analytic. But yet still a free traffic because i believe that by targeting onsite SEO are not enough. We need to get more traffic from offsite SEO .
Since it free, so no doubt to work hard to get more.
Twitter: kevoh99
says:
Sure Jerrick, off site SEO is also quite as important as on-site SEO. Thanks for the addition.
Superb ideas to get boost in website traffic.I’m with article marketing.Its really top way to generate traffic and back link too.Implement both On page and Off page onto your site and see the difference.Content is the king in Seo,so try to write catchy content…
macintosh data recovery recently posted..Mac Data Recovery software
Step one is to make sure you are indexed in the search engines. Start working on offsite SEO and begin learning about AdWords and the other PPC systems available. Visit popular gamer websites or other sites your demo might visit and contact them about display advertising.
denver seo agency recently posted..Case Study
Thanks for your well written aricle regarding suggestions to get more visitors.
I have installed the plugins you suggested for my WP blog.
I used to do ezinearticle submission but recently found out that their CEO decided to make it to be nofollow site. And since then, I stop the article submission to them.
Free domain hosting recently posted..Hostgator Review
Kevin Njoroge
Twitter: kevoh99
Reply:
June 26th, 2011 at 12:29 am
Really, is ezinearticles.com now a nofollow article directory?
You will need a way to track your search engine rankings…there are plenty of free software out there are you can buy something like market samurai to get the job done. Good luck.
I just added the “All in one SEO plugin” — I wish I knew about it months ago, when I started my blog! Thanks for all these tips… great site…
Awesome post, very informative and well written. These suggestions will definitely help many people who are struggling with drawing in traffic to their sites- myself included. Thank you for putting up this helpful article. Take care!
-Ari
Ari recently posted..ClixSense Research – A New Paid Survey Opportunity (FINALLY!)
we just started a “connect with other bloggers” approach. it’s hard but extremely effective – but that’s because the hard stuff works best!! thanks for the tips.
Twitter: technicallyeasy
says:
Those are some great tips. I think being unique, with your ideas and content is a great way of attracting visitors as it makes you stand out in a crowd or other site owners.
Its definitely important to work on load speeds, especially since Matt Cutts and Google have announced that they do take that into consideration in their ranking system. If you look around, Google has placed alot of help for webmasters on youtube as well as their own website. One really great source is if you search for webpagetest on Google, you can run a test on your site with different settings to see how long it takes to load. You can then make your changes, and get a pretty good gauge of the improvements from your change.
-Jean
Thanks for your suggestion. Install Similar post plugin and total cache plugins.
Hopefully they will help getting more visitors to my sites.
Reliable hosting recently posted..InMotion Hosting Review
Twitter: netlaboratory
says:
“Give your article marketing a unique twist”
This is so true. Believe it or not, almost everything has been written on the Internet. You’ve got to make your content exciting, interesting, informative.. even controversial. Otherwise, you’re pretty much wasting your time.
Good article, I love your blog.
Twitter: mybusinesscash
says:
It is important to remember that while these plugins are a good start that there are no magic bullets when it comes to traffic generation. It is like anything else ; what you get out depends on what you have put in.
Thanks for an informative article and keep up the good work. Did anyone confirm the nofollow status of ezines?
The right combination of on page and off page SEO plus a good landing page can drive good traffic. You need to engage your customers in order to have business with them and a good landing page is a great factor.
Twitter: turnkeytitan
says:
Adding social “share” buttons (like your Tweet button) on posts and pages is an easy way to garner some viral attention. In fact, one of my website projects received 6 Google Pluses in 1 day after I added the button to my website.
My favorite social share button generator is http://sharethis.com. WordPress also has a few great plugins, too, like SexyBookmarks.
Cheers!
- Brent
I found that creating a LOT of content and cover a large amount of longtail helps get tons of traffic.
Really great post, Thank you for sharing This knowledge.Excellently written article, if only
all bloggers offered the same level of content as you, the internet would be a much better
place. Please keep it up
A method I like to use, however it needs alot of effort involved, which is why I don’t hear many marketers talk about it. I go to google news, pick whatever news is related to my niche and rewrite an article based on that top on same keywords.
Post on to my site linking back to the original article, once they accept the link back. You can see where I am going with this. Great post Robert!
Just like what other people said, content is the king so its important that we produced a high quality content for our site because this is the reason why people keep on coming back through your site and you can easily attract potential readers if your content is really good and interesting.
Putting lots of content on a website can increase the traffic for the website but this content should be arranged in well manner otherewise the bless can change in curse..
Ironically, you think that designing/making your site/blog is the hardest part, well actually is not. Afterwards comes the real work, a work that will never stop if you want to do it big. I liked very much your SEO strategy and all of your advice are good to follow. I will emphasize on the great content of your blog, and the process of connecting with other bloggers, very important steps.
Picking the right keywords and then choosing an exact domain name can help a lot with getting indexed quickly.
Twitter: dave_steffens
says:
Great insightful article. I totally agree with the section on writing great article content for your site traffic prospects. Great content gets your readers to actually engage more with your site and spread the word about what they liked.
I think this will do, adding up a tool on your website with a complimentary download choices is an extremely great idea to boost your traffic. I have in my opinion experienced this insight on my website.
gracia19 recently posted..Online Dating