If you want to know how to increase web traffic to your site and you want to do it for free, then here are some of my favorite ways to achieve this.
How To Increase Web Traffic To Your Site
Choose The Right Niche
The first thing you can do in regard to how to increase web traffic to your site is by starting off your website well. Right in the beginning when you start your website, make sure that you are creating a niche site. This means that you are targeting a specific subject matter that a certain group of people are looking for information about.
So, for example, instead of having a generalized site about weight loss, of which there are millions, you could make your site a bit more focused. For instance, how to lose weight is too generalized. Rather go for something like how to lose weight with the Keto Diet, or how to get slim thighs in thirty days. Get my drift?
The best and most visited types of sites are those that cater for a specific type of audience. The owners of these sites are looked at as experts in their fields, so your aim is to make your website be the resource that they first look to for expert advice. Over time you need to establish your site as the best resource to go to in your niche.
The best way to start your site is to make a list of your interests.
Next, examine the market and see if your idea for a niche is either very popular online or maybe there aren’t a lot of sites about the topic.
If there is a lot of competition, don’t give up on the idea altogether, especially if you are very knowledgeable about the topic. Try and break it down further. Really dig down to a specific point of your niche that people are searching for.
If you are a member of Wealthy Affiliate, you can use the Jaaxy Tool to do some research and see what people are searching for. This tool saves heaps of time and gets you quickly to what will work and what won’t.
Having a niche site that deals with a specific area of your expertise is an almost guaranteed way to get free search engine traffic. There are all types of websites online, and even though there are millions, there are many niche markets that have limited coverage or no coverage at all.
Many who decide to start an online business seek out the most searched terms and build a site around that. The trouble is that’s what everyone else is also doing and that means that is where the competition is the highest.
Choosing a niche that doesn’t have a lot of competition means that you are going to have a higher flow of web traffic to your site than you would if the competition was stiff. That’s just one of the ways you will enjoy increased traffic.
The other way is simply because surfers are looking for an expert in that niche and once they realize that’s what you are they’ll not only come to your site, but they will share your site with their friends that are interested in that topic.
If you have your idea for your niche already, simply click here and get your website up and running in the next five minutes. Site Rubix will build it for you free of charge.
The Use Of Keywords
In your quest to increase web traffic to your site, you may be overlooking one of the simplest and most ethical ways of getting tons of free traffic to your website.
This is by taking advantage of the use of accurate keywords.
What does this mean?
It means that the keywords you choose should accurately reflect the content that you have written about.
The reason we use keywords is to help surfers find the content they are looking for. Choosing popular keywords that have nothing to do with your content is a commonly made mistake – don’t do it!
Instead, find the most popular relevant keyword and use it in your title. Be extremely literal and descriptive in your title and then use your keyword throughout your article several times in a natural way. You should never keyword stuff, because if you do, Google is likely to punish you by pushing your site down in the search results.
A keyword can be anything from one word to nine words. Obviously the long tail keywords are far easier to rank for. For more on how to do keyword research, you can read this article.
If you have a keyword that’s a bit confusing relating to its meaning take your time to explain to them what you are talking about and what the meaning is. When you use your keyword or keywords throughout your article consider using variations of the word(s) and mixing up the order of your keyword phrase.
Keywords are really very powerful. They help you to place better in the search engines, which means when someone searches for your keyword(s) they are more likely to find you because you show up sooner in the search engines. This translates to more free traffic to your website.
Do Some SEO
If you want to increase free traffic to your website, you definitely need to take advantage of SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEO is serious stuff when it comes to doing it right and ensuring you enjoy the benefits of increased traffic flow.
There are many different aspects involved when doing SEO and one of them is mentioned above and that is by doing keyword research.
You also need to create content that your readers want to read – content that has value and helps your reader to solve a problem they may have.
In that content, you need to make sure that it is search engine optimized. We don’t mean stuffing keywords, but making sure your keywords are used in a natural flow at a rate of about 2% in your content.
Adding helpful links to other sites in your content, as well as to other relevant articles on your own site is a great SEO tactic to remember. It also keeps your visitors on your site for longer as they click to other relevant articles you may have written.
Any links you place in your content should be from trusted sites. Even as a new website, there are natural links you can still obtain that are legitimate and recognized by Google and other search engines as acceptable.
Don’t make the mistake of choosing links that are questionable just so that you have links in your content. You are better off to not have links than you are to have poor quality links.
Add images to your content, as this adds interest to your writing. You can get some great free images at pixabay.com. When you add images make sure that you fill in the image attributes. The keyword should go under the alt tab on the image.
The details like caption, title, description, and alternate text are important to the search engines. Don’t keyword cram but to make sure your keyword(s) are included in your image attributes.
Remember some people will search using Google image search rather than text search and if your image(s) are highly visible you are likely to bring more traffic to your site through this resource.
Write Longer Articles
The longer your article, the better. If you look at all the top pages on the search engines, the articles are all longer than 1000 words.
Make sure you really dig down into your subject choice and write in as much detail as you can, without waffling.
Use fonts that are easy to read and use lots of spaces with short paragraphs as nobody wants to read through a lot of text with no gaps. Make your page easy to read for your visitors and they will stay on your site longer.
Here are some tips for writing great website articles.
If you want to increase your free traffic take advantage of optimized articles. There are three key ingredients to a successful web page/article being optimized:
1. Your meta title
2. Your description
3. Your keywords
This is very simple to fill out and follow when you publish content on your site so take the time to do so. It will help you to begin to rank better and faster with your keywords.
A page title is one of the key factors for page ranking and should be given the care and attention it deserves. Your page title tags show up in SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages. Google and other search engines use the title tag as their search results title for that page.
Every page on your site should have its own unique title tag. It should start with a relevant keyword whenever possible.
Let’s look at an example. If your keyword is blue jeans your title could be “Blue jeans at discounted prices” and the first paragraph of your content could start with something like, “Blue jeans are comfortable and rugged and now you can buy them at discounted prices.”
Try to avoid stop words, which are words that break up your keywords. For example, blue discount jeans. The ‘discount’ would be a stop word.
In your meta description, you need to provide a short and concise summary of what your site content is. Search engines often display the meta description with your title in the search result pages. Your keyword should also be included here.
You’ll have one or more keywords, but you should have one primary keyword and the rest will be secondary. You will use the primary keyword in your title and description.
Link Building
I mentioned links briefly under SEO, but link building is very important for your site, which is why I am discussing it again. You should be building links from your site to other sites and to other pages on your site as explained above, but you also need to look at getting links back from other sites to your own.
This normally happens naturally as more and more quality content is created on your website, but there are also things you can do to build links and help the process along a bit.
- You can trade links with other sites that are directly related to your website’s subject matter to bring more traffic to your site. For example, let’s say you sell oranges on your site, then you could look to link with other sites that sell oranges or related products like orange juice, orange salad, etc.
- You can build two-way links that include the other site providing you with a link while you provide them with a link. You should never link to sites that are inferior or low quality as this will threaten your own ranking in the search engines.
- You can link back to forums and blogs that are related to your site. Find communities that are in your niche market, create a user profile, enter your site information, and then start to make quality posts. This will bring you free traffic to your site.
- You should also directly contact other sites that are related to your niche. If you can get these companies to link to your website through a blog post or how-to article it will significantly increase your free traffic to your site.
- Take the time to create an RSS feed, which will allow your articles to easily link to a number of different places. Submit the RSS feed to numerous related directories and give your traffic a direct boost.
Linking is a powerful tool that when used ethically can increase your traffic and your placement in search engines.
Create Shareable Content
Your content needs to be easily shared so that your visitors can help you spread the word. This is achieved through a combination of using a solid headline and an image that is interesting, along with a solid, captivating lead-in.
This combination helps you to create the perfect small chunk of information about your article that can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and other social media networks.
Lists are very popular for sharing amongst the many social networks.
Sites like Mashable are able to do a fantastic job of using list headlines like “20 Ways to ….. or 10 Signs of….” These do a great job of drawing the reader’s eye and compensate for short attention spans. You can learn from this site and other similar ones about how to create headings that work.
Your content needs to be interesting if you want anyone to be interested in sharing it with others. So, if you just throw something together expect your visitors to put as much effort into it as you did. It will fail!
If you take your time to write something of interest that engages your visitors, they will be very interested in sharing it with other people they know, and those people will share it with others that they know, and so forth, it will grow and grow and grow. Suddenly you have an increase in traffic to your site that’s significant and best of all it’s free. Now that’s how you increase your traffic without spending money.
When it comes to increasing organic search, content marketing through blogging or guest posts is the fastest way to build up your traffic. However, remember that content marketing is a quality game and not a quantity game. If you have horrible content, people won’t bother reading it or sharing it, which is basically the entire point of building a company blog. Therefore, when I write content, I constantly ask myself if I would take ten minutes out of my day to read it, and if I’d share it with others. If you wouldn’t do either of those things, then you really need to look at your content strategy again.
Search engines are rewarding people and companies who are getting high-quality, consistent content coming from them. Things such as author rank are going to have a big effect on organic search results. Put a plan in place to not only create content to publish online but also to be able to maximize the value of the content so that it is properly distributed across social channels and has a chance to go viral.
Quality articles will get ranked better in search results. Make sure that your articles address the needs of your readers, and that they can find all of the information they need in one spot. This is the most effective means for increasing traffic to a website; offering people something that they cannot obtain elsewhere, or at least, not to the level of quality that you are offering it.
Never make the mistake of copying and pasting content from another site. The search engines are too smart and will know that’s what you did. You will be penalized for it and that is going to result in a decrease in traffic.
Your content is key – What an easy way on how to increase web traffic to your site for free.
Interview The Expert
When your followers see that you are bringing industry experts onboard as guests they’ll be excited to not only participate but also tell others about what’s going on within your niche site. That’s certainly going to bring additional traffic your way.
Industry experts are respected and often recognized among surfers and visitors alike. Their expertise is a natural draw. People want to see what they have to say.
Once they are on your website you will have to figure out how you will keep them there and how you will keep them returning You will also want to put into place a method that will work to invite others so that you continue to see your traffic grow.
Take advantage of industry experts – they are a powerful tool that is often underutilized.
So I hope I have helped you when it comes to the question of how to increase web traffic to your site.
Please comment below if you have any further questions.
Hello there, thanks a lot for sharing this wonderful piece of information here with us. I must say I really did enjoy going through your article as it contains valuable information that one needs to be aware of in order to increase web traffic. I just created my own website recently and I have not had a reasonable amount of web traffic yet. Going through this made me realize I have been doing it the wrong way and skipping some important steps. Tt
Thanks for this.
If you want traffic you need to be focusing on SEO and Keywords, and this is not considered an instant strategy, but one that works well over time.
Great tips Michel,
I’ve been thinking a lot about the longer articles part, I saw some YouTube videos the other day mentioning the same thing, it’s not after I read your article I started to ponder on the importance of it. It is a tough decision to make especially when I’m used to writing shorter articles but I guess It’s now or never!
Those stop words are really useful, I never thought of it! Besides the stop words and paragraph breaks, are there any other major tips to writing long articles I could focus on?
Thanks for stopping by Riaz. When writing longer articles it is all to tempting to waffle just to add words, but make sure that you always try to add value. Rather have shorter articles that are helpful than longer articles full of fluff if you haven’t got anything else to write about.
Thank you for your post. It is useful for me. I started my blog for a while now, but the traffic to my website is limited. I am thinking about how to improve, but never take time to do the research.
Here comes your article, which provides a lot of info on how to increase web traffic. I particularly like your description on Write Longer Articles. I don’t know that the longer the article, the better. In my blog, most of the articles are less that 1000 words. It is nice to know that in order to attract search engines, the articles need to be longer than 1000 words. From now on, I will try to write thourogh articles for my website. I wish this would help my site traffic.
As I said to Joy, you just need to keep targeting low competition keywords and keep writing. No, all your posts do not have to all be long, but it definitely helps to have some really long posts on your site to rank your site better in the long run. My site has some posts of 3000 to 5000 words, and other articles as short as 350 words, and a lot of the shorter articles are also getting traffic from the search engines.
I have been creating content for my website and my next question is, “How to draw people to visit my site?” Without gaining traffic to my site, I think it will not be ready for any affiliate program. This post is just so timely. I learned a lot of what I am exactly looking for at this point. I always try to keep my blog posts around 1000+ words which is good as what you mentioned here.
Never consider the meta description before but I guess I have to utilize it in my next article. Thank you for these wonderful pointers.
Keep writing Joy and the traffic will come, as long as you are targeting good keywords for each post. As your site grows the search engines will start to take notice and some of your posts will get to the first page of the search results. That’s when the traffic starts to come.