9 Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Are you looking for ways to increase traffic to your website? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. By utilizing SEO, social media marketing, and creating engaging content, it is possible to drive more traffic to your website and boost engagement levels with current users. Discover the nine easy tips that will help you increase traffic to your site. Nine easy tips to increase traffic to your site are:

• Optimize your content through:
  • Text SEO
  • Image SEO
  • Design SEO
  • Meta SEO
  • Code SEO
• Use Social Media to Promote Your Content.
• Encourage Sharing of Your Content. 
• Take Advantage of Email Marketing. 
• Try Podcasting and Video Marketing.

Optimize Your Content for SEO to Get More Traffic to Your Website. 

Optimizing your content for search engines is essential if you want to drive more traffic to your website. To do this, research relevant keywords related to the content you are creating and include those in the titles, headings, and body text. Additionally, try to limit the number of words on each page in order to make sure it’s optimized for speed while still having enough words that the content feels complete. Lastly, create internal links that help users navigate within your website as they read your content.

Text SEO

Write your content with both SEO (search engine optimization) and your users in mind. It’s a difficult balancing act between making your website functional and easy to use and making your website optimized for search engine algorithms so you show up high on their search results. But it can be done with patience, empathy, user-testing, and knowing a few tricks for SEO.

First, use headings and lists to better organize your content and make it easier to scan both by readers and search engines. 

Second, write your content in plain language. This includes:

• Using active voice and present tense.
• Being Concise.
• Avoiding jargon, noun strings, and hidden verbs.
• Keeping the tone conversational.
• Writing at 6th grade level or below.
• Keeping long sentences at a minimum!

Image SEO

When using images of any kind, add alt text that describes the image; write it clearly and accurately since not only search engines check it but also users with vision handicaps use programs and apps that look at alt text to tell their users what the image is. Make sure that images beneath the fold (bottom of what can be seen upon first loading the page) are set to lazy loading so they don’t slow down your website loading.  

Also, make sure your images aren’t huge or are too high resolution since that will cause pages to take longer to load. Use a lower resolution format like JPG or a plugin that compress images so they don’t take as long to load.

Design SEO

Speed is key for SEO. First, the site needs to be fast to load pages, known as the website’s load time. This has only gotten more important in recent years since users’ patience for pages that take longer than a few seconds to load has decreased dramatically. A frustrated user will leave the site resulting in a high bounce rate. Google checks a site’s pages’ load time and puts faster pages higher in their search rankings.

Users need to be able to find elements. A simple and easy-to-use sitemap helps users find the page with the info or other content they were looking for, along with supplemental pages. The consumers also need to be able to use the page and its elements easily. Consumers hate broken links and widgets/plugins that just don’t work. Make sure your site is user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing to them so that they keep using it and Google ranks it higher.

Design your website logically and clearly so search engine bots can crawl through it easily. Organize both the website’s overall layout as well as the layout on the pages this helps both users and search bots find your pages and posts. 

Meta SEO

Meta descriptions are vital for SEO since they tell search engines and users what your page/post is about. Meta descriptions need to be enticing to readers while being honest about the topics and content of the page. On top of that, they need to be concise, no more than 160 characters for search engines. Social media platforms have their own specifications for descriptions; Facebook is more lenient with a 200 max character limit while Twitter also follows the 160 characters rule. (Plugins like All-in-One SEO help with this.)

Include search keywords in your content. Most people type in a short phrase into Google when they are looking for something. ‘How to write in cursive’, ‘who was the president during WWII’, etc.  These short phrases are made up of keywords that users are looking for in the sites they see available to them. Google’s bots keep track of the most common keywords that users are looking for and make suggestions for users as they type.

The bots also look for sites that have these keywords and rank them higher in the search results for those keywords. Sites and pages can target multiple keywords in different ways to further get user’s and Google’s attention: they can put the keywords in the title, headings, and body of the content; they can put in in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the page; and they can put the keyword(s) in alt text in images in the content.

Code SEO

You should make sure your website has its code condensed to quicken page loading. There are WordPress plugins for this if your optimizer plugin doesn’t have this feature (or just sucks at it).

For those of you who are coding your own website, use semantics in your code. Semantics tell search engines what each part of the page is and how users are supposed to use it, whether it is for navigation, content (section or article), a sidebar (aside), the header, or the footer. It may be tempting to just make your code mostly divs, but that cripples your pages’ SEO. Go the extra mile and use semantics; you wont regret the little extra time they take. 

Also, remember to put your meta descriptions in each page’s head, and make sure your pages look good at different device sizes. Most people browse the web on their mobile device, which can be a large range of sizes (300px up to and beyond 1000px). If the page doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less or just looks bad on their device, you can be sure they will leave and look elsewhere.

Use Social Media to Promote Your Content.

Social media is one of the most powerful tools for driving traffic to your website. Posting content regularly on platforms like Twitter and Facebook can help you reach potential visitors that may have not heard about your website yet. You can provide links to your website within your posts in order to increase the likelihood of them clicking through and discovering more of what you have to offer! Additionally, connecting with influencers or other webmasters who are active in the same niche could be a great way to get the word out about your website.

Encourage Sharing of Your Content. 

If your content is interesting and engaging, then you should encourage people to share it with others. Taking a few moments to add social media share buttons on each page of your website can make a big difference in how many people see your content and visit your website. Encouraging people to share it through their own profiles will not only help increase traffic, but also build prestigious backlinks that could improve your search engine rankings as well.

To further encourage sharing of content, make content that is authoritative with statistics and tips for users. Second, make interesting, informative infographics that better show concepts and statistics for readers. Other bloggers and companies will use your content as their source when they use the statistics or infographics in their content. In other words, make content that others want to ‘steal’ for their SEO for Google.

Take Advantage of Email Marketing. 

Email marketing can be a great way to drive traffic to your website because you are able to reach people directly. Make sure that you have an email list that you update regularly, with new content or offers. Include a call-to-action in each of your emails so that people can visit your website directly from the email. Additionally, consider adding links to popular pages on your site in each of your emails. This can help guide visitors to the most useful parts of your website and potentially encourage them to take further action such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

Try Podcasting and Video Marketing.

Podcasting and video marketing can be great ways to drive more traffic to your website. Developing high quality podcast and video content that is interesting, relevant, and valuable to your target audience can help spread the word about your brand and generate more website visitors. Additionally, make sure you are optimizing both podcast audio files, as well as videos for SEO by including relevant keywords in titles, descriptions, tags, etc., which can help boost search engine rankings on Google and other search engines.