How To Increase Traffic To Your Website

Having a website is only the beginning of successfully marketing online. Now you have to get people to visit (i.e. drive traffic) your spankin' new sparkly website. And you want to drive quality traffic - visitors who are actually your target market and are likely to buy from you.

Here are a few tips to increase traffic to your website:

Optimize your content. Identify keywords that are used to search for the type of products and services you offer and work them into the text on your site. This can help your SEO ranking. These keywords should ideally appear a few times in your titles, the first 1 - 2 paragraphs of the page, and sprinkled throughout the article. However, don't overdo it - Google will penalize your for that. If you have a WordPress site, get plugins such as All-In-One SEO or Yoast, which you can add "SEO Title" and "Meta Keyword" to all your posts and pages - this is great if getting the keywords into your title and articles is challenging. To help you find the right keywords, use Google AdWords to get insight into which ones are more competitive and how many searches they get per month. You can try looking up phrases or questions - and use those phrases or questions as your blog title. Use Alt Tags for Images. Search engine can't "see" image, but they can "see" alt tags just like html text. This is just as important as tagging the text if you want search engines to notice you. Submit your website URL to search engine directories. Add sharing buttons to your blog posts to help your fans spread the word for you - word of mouth of powerful.

Driving traffic to your site is only half the story, you also want to make your visitors stick around and return from time to time. Here are a few tips to help you do so:

Be mindful of your website's load time. Although it's not an issue for most, it does get frustrating when you have huge images, and unnecessary bells and whistles that make people wait forever (and that can be a matter of a few seconds in the land of the interwebs). If your visitors have to wait too long for each page to load, they may just run out of patience and leave. If you have codes (e.g. tracking) that can be placed either in the header or the footer area, put them in the footer area so that it won't affect the load time of the top part of your pages. Make sure your website is easy to navigate so that your audience can find the relevant content quickly and easily. If they can't find what they need, they will get frustrated and leave, thinking that you don't have what they are looking for. Write in "simple" and proper English - check your grammar and spelling, but avoid "big words" and jargons as much as you can. You can test your articles' "readability score" here. Ideally, your score for "grade level" should be around 7 - 8 (means a 7 - 8 grader can understand), to make your articles easy to digest and accessible to most.