Building your website is the first step towards increasing online traffic to your business, hobby or cause. It can be discouraging to discover that after you have invested time, effort and money into launching your website that visitor interest and traffic remain flat.
Fortunately, there is quite a bit that can be done to improve traffic to your site. This article explores using organic traffic building techniques to increase traffic to your website.
Publish High-Quality User Content
The most important activity that will improve your website’s search engine ranking, which will increase its traffic, is publishing high-quality, informative and engaging content as frequently as you are able. Good content engages visitors and encourage them to bookmark, share and return to your site.
Keep in mind that search engine ranking algorithms tend to favor sites with relevant fresh content and long user retention times over those sites with stale content and high user bounce rates.
Add and Tag Images and Video
Video and images, properly described, can increase the rankings that search engines assign to your website. Relevant and entertaining image and video content will also increase the likelihood that your visitors will want to visit your site by nearly 95 percent.
Make sure that your videos and images are named descriptively. Names such as WhirlpoolDishwasher.jpg will help search engine bots make sense of content. Content with names like product12345.jpg will not.
Image and video sitemaps are recommended by Google as a means to provide metadata about your visual content to assist their search bots in ranking your content.
High Authority Link Building
Link building with high authority websites allows you to reap the two-fold benefits of increasing your website’s popularity and its search engine ranking at the same time.
High authority sites are popular news, popular blogs and high quality reference sites such as Wikipedia. Your website’s useful and high-quality content will give you a strong approval likelihood when requesting high authority sites to link to your website. And with Wikipedia especially, because of its extremely high authority, certain high standards additionally apply.
Public Relations (PR) Campaigning
Getting a media outlet to mention your website by either providing them with a newsworthy topic or being the subject of one, can boost public awareness of your site and organically drive more traffic to it.
Solicit User Feedback
One of the most effective but poorly implemented means to increase user interest in your website is to ask your users about their experiences and opinions of your website. While it’s certainly not practical to implement every suggestion, oftentimes there are fundamental areas your site may need to address to improve user retention and conversion. Consider the feedback to be a type of rough workflow that must be mined to discover weak areas.
Encourage Content Sharing
Having quality content, video and images and newsworthy items is absolutely a must. Giving your visitors the means to easily share them, will help make that content available to a larger audience.
Long Tail Keyword Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Nowadays, its nearly impossible to obtain a top search result listing from short popular keywords and phrases. That’s not as big of an issue as it may seem. Long tail keyword SEO allows you to target the vertical market where your audience’s interest resides and increases the ranking that your page receives when it is searched for by them.
Tools such as Google Analytics provide powerful assistance with discovering meaningful long tail keywords appropriate to your website.
Drive Traffic From Your Social Media Site
Pointing to your website from your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube and other social media accounts can direct new traffic to your website. While it is a subject of some debate as to the relationship between increased search engine ranking and social media activity, there is consensus that it doesn’t hurt, and most likely helps your site’s ranking.
Remove Search Engine Indexing Barriers
Content that is accessed only by logging in is invisible to search engine ranking bots.
Google and Bing frown on all attempts to increase page ranking using paid traffic, keyword stuffing, low authority link building and other such schemes. Their new machine learning algorithms are extremely sophisticated at spotting these tactics and their penalties for those caught using them can be severe.
Parting Thoughts
Creating a popular website for business or personal use can be a very rewarding experience. Following the techniques outlined in this article can greatly improve the number of visits your site gets and how your website is ranked by the search engines.