10 Most Easy Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

You are writing amazing posts with more than 2000 words. You have all those major keywords in your post and Meta that you think you can rank easily. But you are still not able to get the traffic to your website. This happens to most of us. The problem with most of the publishers today is that they are writing for the search engines rather than actual readers. Over the years Google has developed enormously and their algorithm gets changed every time for the purpose of quality search. However, the main ranking factor is still the same. That is, the content should be written with readers in mind rather than search engines.  You see, Google is semantic now which means it understand very clearly what is the meaning behind the searched query and what are the best possible ways to give its users a quality page on search results.

I went through all the forums, websites, blogs and podcasts and discussed with many publishers to find out what are their best ways to increase traffic to the website. With more than 70 different opinions from them, I drilled down major 10 effective ways to drive the traffic to your website.

Please feel free to bookmark this page, share it with your social media and let people know how to get real traffic to the website. You can post comments and thoughts and I will respond to all of you.

Focus on Long Tail Keywords: These are the keywords a user types in the search engine to find the exact match. Now, you have to understand first what your blog is all about and what are the best areas you can perform and find out the major keywords of your website. Here is a simple keyword vs. long tail keyword example.

“Grow Hair” is a simple keyword however the user usually types “How to grow hair fast”. If you see in search engine “Grow Hair” is a good keyword but it has very high competition and the user will usually see the Google ads or some highest ranking website. Now if you focus again on our long tail keyword “How to Grow Hair fast”. It has low competition but will rank on the first page of Google and at the top. That means you are going to get most clicks on your post. Long tail keywords are what users now type in the search engines. After the hummingbird update, Long tail keywords are a great way to drive traffic to your website.

Improve your post: Consider a user goes to Google and types a search query and luckily he gets to your website. He goes to your website and he doesn’t find any good content and returns back to Google Search to search again a better site. This is not a good sign because the user is not finding any good content and he returned back to Google to find a better site.  That means Google understand that the site is of low quality and the content doesn’t impress its user. Some people believe that this is not a ranking factor, but believe me it’s all semantic and you will never get any helpful resource online. You need to improve your topic in the first two or three paragraphs such that the user sticks to your website and spend some time on your website. Don’t try to be over smart on your blog post and don’t get carried away with off topics when writing a good content.

Writing Controversial Content: Writing controversial content can be good and can draw attention of readers if done perfectly. You have to write such contents based on facts which mean you have to give the proofs and then speak. Well, finding controversies is little hard but if you can get a perfect controversial topic; you can drive huge traffic to your website. Controversial topics go viral but can be suicidal unless a majority of people are against a topic. For example, writing a controversy about a Brand can put your in trouble but writing a topic against Child abuse or pornography will always be helpful and the masses are with you. You have the rights to speak on such topics rather than on the topics which include Brand names as they can any time put you in trouble. Google News is the best friend for finding controversies. 😉

Decrease Bounce Rate: A bounce rate is a factor which means how long a visitor stays on your website/page before moving to some other website/page. If you check your Google Analytics, you can find out your website’s bounce rate. A bounce rate depends upon various factors such as industry, optimization, targeted audience, the size of the site and much more. There is no exact percentage of what is a good bounce rate for a website and neither Google is going to tell you so better not to stumble upon on other websites to find out what should be an ideal bounce rate for your website. Most of the sites disagree with each other. The only thing is that if a bounce rate is low, it’s very good for your blog. From my experience a bounce rate of 20% to 30% has always been good for my site.

Improve Your Site Speed: Google has confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor in SEO. Google Developers often say that sites that take too much time to load, brings down the quality of that website no matter how good the content is in that website. Also, it’s not that you have to optimize sites only for desktops, but for smartphones too. You can check your site speed on tools by Pingdom.com.

Use Social Media: Years back Google was using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to rank a website. Yes, they did. But they are not using this factor any more and are just thinking it as a normal website backlink. Though the links are always nofollow from social networks, they are called good links because they came from high ranking websites. To get the traffic to your website, you need to build your online presence in Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Build a community on the social networks and share your links with the users. If they are interested they will click on the link and visit your site giving you traffic to your website.

Write Fresh Content: Blogs that have fresh content makes Google think that the site is active and regular content is written for the users. This gives your site a good favour because the sites that do not update go stale and thus drops your search engine rankings. Write at least 2 posts every week to make your blog active.

Forget about too many backlinks: People often go for huge number of backlinks. They pay lots of money to some services to get high PR backlinks. Well, it doesn’t matter if the backlink is from high PR or not because Page Rank is dead now. Google has said that the PR is not a factor to rank a website. That means backlink is a backlink and not a PR backlink. But quality backlinks from aged domains which are always active and have huge audience will always be good for your website. Try to create 100 backlinks each day and your rank will go down. But try to create one quality backlink each day and you will rank higher. That’s the concept here. Do not overdo back linking as only the quality link matters.

Join Forums: Usually Forums are always active. There are hundreds if not thousands of forums that have huge audience and daily active users. Join forums which are related to your niche and learn from the users what are they doing on their website and how are they driving traffic to their website. If they are better than you, then don’t think them as your competitor but think of them as your mentor. Learn what they are doing with their blogs and how are they optimizing their website. It’s always a good idea to include a signature in your profile that links to your website.

Join fellow bloggers: It’s a great idea to be friends with other bloggers who share the same idea and niche as you do. Because if you have written a good blog post, you can always ask him to include your post link in his blog thus can drive extra traffic to your site. The same way you can do to his links and that’s what I call a mutual blogging where we share our links in our posts.

All these major points are written from my SEO experience over the past 7 years building websites online. Feel free to ask any questions or suggestions if you have any.