I am often asked how to get more website visitors. There are two answers to this question:
1. Work within your website
2. Work outside of your website
Working within your website
It is important to learn as much as you can about your CMS (Content Management System), such as WordPress. WordPress has numerous features that can help you to engage with your website visitors more effectively. If they enjoy visiting your website the first time around, they are more likely to return.
A better understanding of your CMS will give you more control over your website. It will make it easy for you to add new content and display the information effectively.
Engaging content
Your content should be helpful, engaging, factual, relevant and interesting.
Within your website pages and blog entries, aim to write at least 400 words. I know that this is quite a bit of text. Ideally, aim for 1000+ words per item so that you can go into more depth.
Google likes to discover long pages, full of well-written informative content.
Blog regularly
Blog within your site regularly i.e. once a week. Blogging can have a significant effect on the number of website visitors that you receive. Find out what your customers are really interested in learning about.
Think about the world’s best known sites such as bbc.co.uk and Wikipedia. They have a great deal of content and a considerable number of pages, don’t they?
By the way, don’t write about yourself / your enterprise the whole time. Instead, write for your customers and help them to learn and improve their lives. Here are some blogging tips which may help you.
Do you love to write? Here are some copywriting tips which you may find useful.
Website meta data
In order to get traffic to a website it is important to understand meta data. This helps search engines to understand what a web page is about.
This includes the all important Title Tag, that Google reads.
If you are interested in SEO, you are welcome to join thousands of people within The Marketing Compass and check out the SEO group there.
Working outside of your website
This is all about getting more links pointing to your website.
There are several answers to the question ‘how do you get backlinks?’
The most effective answer is to write useful material.
You could offer to write guest blogs for relevant websites that include a backlink.
I receive requests for guest blogs every day and I reject all of these requests as I do not know the sender.
On this basis, I suggest that you invest some time in building relationships with the websites that could help you.
Social media
Google takes into account your social media footprint, i.e. the social media platforms which you belong to and are active within.
Interestingly, this ties in with blogging. If you are a frequent blogger, you will find that more people share your blog and you will also receive more backlinks.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the primary answer to the question ‘how to increase website traffic’ is to become a recognised expert in your field and to demonstrate this, within your website. This is easier than ever before, due easy to work with website content management systems.
Nigel Temple is an digital marketing consultant, author, speaker and trainer. He shows business owners, marketers, professionals and teams how to get better results from marketing, including online brand awareness, improved search engine rankings, social media effectiveness, website traffic and sales enquiries / sales.
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