If you are a business owner and have a website, or even if you’re not a business owner but have a website, the one thing that you’d like above everything else would be ‘more traffic’. If you’re from a non-technical background, this task seems even more daunting to you. However, contrary to popular belief, increasing web traffic is not relativistic physics. Not even close. Here are 5 simple ways to increase web traffic:
Content
Back in 1996, when Bill Gates said “Content is King”, he wasn’t kidding. No matter what else you do, if you don’t have good content on your website, nobody will care. And believe me, if you want web traffic, you’ll want people to care. So, how do you go about writing great content?
- Start with catchy headlines
- Make your posts informative, witty and useful
- Write often
- Cover current news and trending topics they are more likely to get more hits
- Write about topics which people can debate on; don’t shy away from controversial topics
Use Multimedia
As good as good content is, it’s even better with eye-catching photos and meaningful infographics. Make sure your media is Pinterest and Instagram friendly. Upload your videos to Youtube and Vimeo, and link your website in their description.
Be Social
Yes. Quid Pro Quo. If you want more social attention, you will need to pay attention and be social. And you will need to give other people attention. First of all, create a Facebook page (duh!) and post a notification every time you update something, or even otherwise. Tweet all your posts, post relevant content on LinkedIn, create a Tumblr blog, reblog your content, follow other people, reblog their content to attract more followers, follow followers of influential bloggers on these websites, include social media sharing buttons on your website, end your posts in a way that makes sure that comments will follow, for example with a question.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
I know that sounds technical. But it’s nothing that would require Zuckerberg.
Make sure your website has well-connected links. That makes it easier for browsers to crawl your website. Google Analytics is an indispensable tool to analyze your traffic and improve your website’s listing on search engines. You could also use search engine plugins like the Yoast search engine plugin. SEO is a great way to increase web traffic.
Responsiveness
Lastly, if you’re thinking that all your traffic comes from people sitting on their PCs and laptops, you couldn’t be more wrong. A huge chunk of it comes from smartphone users! And for smartphones users to visit your website, the prerequisite is to create a website that is easy for them to browse on their small screens.
This essentially means that you should make your website responsive so that it can adjust to various display sizes. A very simple way of doing so is using Bootstrap, which is basically Twitter’s CSS library and not only makes your website responsive but also gives it a great look.
