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10 tips on how to increase website traffic

If you have taken time to build an amazing looking online home for your business, you will want to know how toincrease website traffic.

Depending on your business model, the quantity and quality of any online traffic will differ. For news andpublishing websites looking to maximise advertising revenue, generating thousands of clicks to tempt advertisersis an essential.

For brands looking to generate business through e-commerce shops and relevant clicks onto contact pages, thenthe name of the game is driving targeted traffic.

Whichever strategy you are looking to impose, there are a number of ways you can increase website traffic bymaking both on-site changes and implementing off-site marketing strategies.

How to increase website traffic through on-site changes

1. Search engine optimisation

Still the most powerful source of website visits is organictraffic, website traffic from Google, Bing and other onlinesearches will typically make up around 50% of a websitestraffic, and optimising your website to win these clicks isfundamental when it comes to building a successful website.

There are a number of simple things you can do to make sureyour website is search engine friendly.

The first place to start is with keyword research, and decidewhich keyphrase you want visitors to be searching when theyvisit your websites home page. For new websites it is a goodidea to pick keyterms with 500+ monthly searches but are

low/medium competitiveness.

You can then use this key term within your website. Include it in your websites title. A good formula for websitetitles is ‘Brand Name | Determiner + Keyphrase + Exclamation’.

An example could be ‘Sports.com | Your home of sports equipment online!’. Use around 65 characters in yourpage title.

Next is to include your keyphrase in your meta description, This is the the text that will appear under your title insearch results which explains what your website does.

Using the Sports.com example, you could have:

Title: Sports.com | Your home of sports equipment online!Meta: Sports.com is a national brand that sells sports equipment online at great prices. Special offers now on!

The last step is to include your keyphrase numerous times in the text on your homepage. Have a few paragraphsthat explain who your brand is and what your website is all about, ensuring to use your keyphrase in H1 and H2headings and alt tags in images too.

If you get your on-page SEO right, then your website can climb up the search rankings and gain those invaluableorganic clicks.

2. Consistent content/blog

Content marketing has become an extremely popular andfundamental way to increase website visits.

A simple way to promote your website through contentmarketing is including an on-site blog that talks about newsand offers insights and opinions. Some good examplesinclude the Twitter blog, Zavvi blog and dare I say the Fabricblog.

Create interesting and relevant articles on a regular basis (4+articles per week as a guide). If you are struggling for contentideas or really want to boost traffic, do more keywordresearch in AdWords on possible article headlines based onwhat people are searching for.

For our Sports.com online retailer, there may be 100 people amonth searching ‘what type of studs should I wear ondifferent pitches?’ so do an article explaining this, with thesearch term included in the title, subtitles and content.

You can then include relevant internal links to product or services pages.

3. Add internal links within articles and on popular pages

What easier way is there to boost the number of pageviews your websitegets than simply getting your current visitors to look at more pages?

Whether it’s within a blog post or on popular pages, such as your homepage, add relevant internal links that direct the user to more information.

If you are about to publish an article about football boots but rememberyou published a relevant article called ’5 products to help keep yourfootball boots looking brand new’, include a ‘SEE MORE:’ or ‘RelatedArticle’ link within the article so that the reader can easily navigate the theequally as engaging blog post.

That one visitor has just become two pageviews, and the more articlesyou publish and the more relevant in-site links you add, that one user cangenerate up to ten pageviews to help boost your analytics data.

4. Add social sharing links

There’s just no getting around it anymore. Social media is atool that nearly all companies should be using to promotethemselves online, but a great place to start is on yourwebsite itself.

Social sharing is a great way to boost visitor numbersthrough social clicks, and there are even suggestions thatlinks and shares from social networks can have an affect onsearch rankings.

Make the social sharing buttons prominent on every page, oreven introduce a pop-up once the user has been on the samepage for longer than 30 seconds asking for them to share onFacebook, Twitter and other relevant social networks.

5. Add newsletter sign-ups

Another easy way to generate further visits is to addnewsletter sign-up forms to some of your key pages and usestrong call to actions or promises of special offers to get themto sign up. Once you have a strong mailer list, you can startto send mail shots and newsletters to your fans andcustomers.

If they like what they see, they will click back through to yourwebsite. One well-crafted email sent to a few thousandpeople can generate hundreds of clicks each time it is sentout.

How to increase website traffic through off-site marketing

1. Social media marketing

Carrying on from adding social sharing buttons to yourwebsite, it is also important to generate your own activesocial media channels.

Create Facebook and Twitter pages, and look into Pinterest,Instagram and other more niche networks if your product oroffering is more creative in nature. Personalise each accountwith your branding (including background, header and profileimages) and update it daily with special offers, links to yourblog and do some promotional competitions to driveengagement.

A must have social account is now Google+. Links shared onGoogle+ back to your website/blog will last longer and rank higher in search rankings than links from any othernetworks!

2. AdWords

Paid advertising isn’t a sin, and it can be extremely usefuland profitable. For large companies with bigger profitmargins, spending thousands of pounds driving clicks andgenerating sales is a perfectly stable business model.

For smaller brands, this cannot always be an option when it comes to driving website traffic. A good cheaperalternative to search advertising though is to implement a display campaign through AdWords. Such a campaignwill display images and graphics on other relevant websites to drive clicks, and can be charged on a ‘cost perthousand impressions (CPM)’ basis.

The result? Thousands of potentially interested website surfers will see your advert, and some will click backthrough to your website. Done the right way and display adverts can cost half the price per click as typical CPCadvertising.

3. Publish articles on websites with higher traffic

If you have been on a website that includes a ‘News fromaround the web’ section at the end of each article, youmay have wondered why big news publications wouldoffer to link out to other potential rival websites.

The reason is that the website displaying the otherarticles from around the internet get paid everytime youclick on one of the links. If you want to generate morevisits and you think your content could be relevant, thenthis is a great avenue to look at for driving new trafficfrom more powerful websites.

4. Post on relevant forums and blogs in a helpfulmanor

The key here is in the title. Posting comments on forums andblogs relevant to your own website is a great way to drivemore clicks and website traffic, but you have to do it in theright way. Spam comments on forums for SEO purposes isbecoming a real danger to websites rankings, so ensurewhat ever comment you do make is helpful and related to what ever topic the blog or forum post was about.

Offer some further insights and tips, and mention your brand. Try and avoid linking back to your website at first as

webmasters may see your comments as a clear way to build links. Gain trust, post frequently and help as manypeople as you can with your industry insight, and they will start to click onto your links.

5. Improve search rankings for your keywords

Off-site SEO is another major way to boost traffic, and that allimportant organic traffic too. Use the keywords you identifiedand targeted for your homepage, and gain links from relevantwebsites and blogs that include a mixture of that keywordand generic call to action phrases such as ‘click here’.

An entire link portfolio derived of exact match anchor textlinks will set sirens ringing in Matt Cutts’ office, and yourwebsite may be punished in the rankings by Google and allthat traffic you worked so hard to gain will be lost.