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Bringing traffic to your website is a form of online marketing, and it isn’t a magic formula where you snap your fingers and *poof*, you have regular visitors on your website or blog. It takes work, and most importantly, time and dedication to drive traffic to site. There are many ways to increase traffic to your website or blog, but it boils down to building trust and credibility. When people trust you, they become loyal to you, and that’s the whole point to having a blog: to build that trust. Here are 10 website traffic tips (and a couple of bonus tips) to keep in mind if you really want to grow the number of visitors on your website or blog.

10. Have a blog, not just a static website.

A blog is one of the most important online marketing tools you can have for driving traffic to your website. It helps you to build your brand and the trust your audience has in your brand. You readers will come to see your business or brand as being an authority in your area of expertise. It’s also very important for search engines because it keeps the site “alive” from their perspective, not to mention providing more content to be indexed, which means your site will be more likely to be found in people’s search results.

9. Write at least once a month, but even better would be once week (or more).

If you want to attract more traffic to your site, you need to engage your readers with quality content. We’re preaching to ourselves as well when I mention this important factor because I totally understand that it’s not always easy to find the time if you don’t have enough staff. It may seem difficult, but it just takes some discipline to get into a regular habit of writing regular blog posts. It’s important to write regularly because, as mentioned above, this is how your site will be found: the more articles you have on your blog, the more content will be indexed by the search engines, which will then snowball into more traffic because your site is more likely to come up in search results with all that quality content available for visitors to find!

8. Make sure your website and/or blog has a nice, clean design so that it’s easy to navigate (think of your website as the first impression of your business or brand to your visitors).

Keep in mind that the traffic you want on your website are human beings, not robots. There are many psychological reasons a visitor will linger on your website longer than another website, so it’s important to take its design into consideration. If your site is looking outdated, it may be important to invest in a redesign to “freshen it up” at least once every few years. Web Design Best Practices and Design trends are always changing an evolving, always becoming more “modern”, and what was beautiful yesterday isn’t necessarily beautiful today. Let’s face it: it’s human nature to want to “look upon beauty”, and turn away from something that isn’t pleasing to the eye. Websites are a visual tool, and if a picture can tell a thousand tales, how much more (or less) so does your website tell your visitors? You don’t want to give the impression that you’re neglecting your image and appearance (your brand), and if people feel that even if only on a sub-conscious level, then they’ll be turned off by your site and move on to something else much more quickly because your site is simply not attractive. Maybe think of it as a “first date” with a visitor – you want to look your best, and you’d like to have more dates!

7. Avoid having broken links on your site.

Broken links are a sure way to drive traffic away from your website! They are a warning sign to visitors – if they click on a link on your blog and/or website and it leads to a “page not found” page, then you’re going to lose credibility, and fast! This is something I can help with if you’d like – it’s important to regularly monitor your pages and/or blog posts for broken links so you can correct those in a timely manner. If you’re interested in having me help you with this, check out the UC Web Care Plans I offer.

6. Use words that relate to your area of expertise.

If you want to people (and search engines) to find your website when they search for a certain topic, then make sure you write about that subject! Keep in mind that you don’t overly repeat the same things because you don’t want to sound like a mindless automaton who spews out the same words over and over again. Your goal is to purposely use word choices that will help others see you as someone who knows about a specific topic (usually relating to your business or brand’s area of expertise). Remember that it’s this content that will be indexed by the search engines and show up in search results, so if you want people to find your website if they search for a specific word, you’ll have to use that word in your content at least a few times so that the search engines know that page has relevant content.

5. Take the time to comment on other blogs.

Another method of driving traffic to your own blog is to comment on others’ blogs. The more you network with others in your area of expertise online, the more people will become interested in your content, and the more people will find your content to be of great quality and maybe even go a step further by sharing it with others or maybe even link back to your website. It’s all about creating a snowball effect in different ways!

4. Participate in forums related to your area of expertise.

What better way to drive traffic to your site than to participate in online forums relating to your area of expertise where others interested in that topic will go to discuss different things, ask questions, answer other people’s questions, etc. This is another great way to build credibility and trust as an authority in your area – and the more people trust you and your thoughts and opinions, the more interested they will be in hearing more from you! If you’re not sure how you would go about finding forums within your niche, just do a search on Google with the word “forum” and some words relating to your area – there are literally millions of forums freely available on the internet!

3. Encourage interaction on your blog by asking people to leave comments.

There’s no guarantee people will comment, but a blog’s purpose is not to be a one-way conversation, but rather a two-way conversation between you and your visitors. This is one of the reasons why having a blog is so important for building your website or blog traffic – having that two-way conversation is what will catch people’s interest and help to have them come back to your website and/or blog. One of the ways I try to do this ourselves is by asking a question at the end of a post (you’ll see below that I at least attempt to practice what I preach). 🙂 There’s absolutely no harm in asking for feedback because, after all, if you don’t ask, you really can’t expect people to participate. Everyone seems to be lacking time these days, so visitors are more likely to leave your website or blog without commenting in order to move on to the next bit of content they want to read about online, unless you ask them a question so that they might trigger their interest enough to answer.

2. Use social media regularly to share your content with others.

Social media has become such an important tool that if you want to increase the chances of your business or brand doing well, you need to be on at least a few different social networks. There are so many different social media outlets out there, but some are very major players in this field, such as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and let’s not forget YouTube! Some of these social networks are free to use (for certain aspects), and sometimes you’ll want to pay (such as setting up ads), but either way, online marketing takes time and effort and dedication. You can probably imagine that it’s a big job for one person alone. Just so you know, I do offer a Digital Marketing Service that could help in this area – I can help you to develop a solid digital marketing strategy that you can implement to improve your online marketing results, and even if you don’t have the staff to do it, I network with many business in this area and sometimes, all you need is an affordable part-time virtual assistant. You definitely don’t want to try to do this all yourself – there’s a quite a bit to learn and you’ll want to spend time on your actual business, but don’t neglect this either – I highly recommend you have someone dedicated to helping you with your digital marketing efforts!

1. If you’re not seeing the results you hoped for, don’t give up on your blog.

If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again! Don’t give up on your blog or website. It often takes years to start getting regular traffic from visitors. If you come to a point where you feel like all you see is tumbleweeds blowing in the virtual online wind on your website, then maybe you’re not doing enough of the some of the steps described in this article. Analyze what your strategy is, what steps you’ve taken at this point, and figure out if you’ve been diligent enough in setting aside time to devote to your online marketing plan. Be brutally honest with yourself: if you’re not doing these steps on a regular basis, the results will be disappointing. Your website isn’t just an informational gateway to you and/or your brand; it has the potential to be so much more as a marketing tool! It takes patience and hard work to earn regular visitors, and once you have them, it’s very rewarding to see your hard work pay off!

Bonus Tip: don’t be afraid of a little controversy!

One way to encourage interaction and gain more visitors is to post content on controversial topics. If applicable to your area of expertise, it can do wonders for the traffic to your website or blog. The more people feel passionate about their opinions towards a subject, the more likely they will be to leave a comment and keep coming back for more! You can catch your visitors’ attention more easily with this approach, but don’t go overboard – if you offend your visitors, you’ll be driving them away instead!

Extra-bonus tip and possibly the most important tip on this page: Build an Email List

I mentioned that your website shouldn’t just be an informational gateway – think of it as a lead-generating marketing tool! If you set it up right, you can grow your regular audience by offering something helpful, such as a free eBook, or even a coupon code that only people who subscribe to your email list will receive. That’s the key: having a visitor on your site or blog is only the first step, but getting them to keep coming back involves being able to remind them of your blog, send info on new content or posts, offer special promotions, etc., and to do that, you need to be able to email them. Email is definitely not “dead” – it’s has consistently remained one of the best ways to market online in the past decade.

Some people are still cautious about providing their email address, but If you have quality content on your website and you earn their trust as in authority in your field, offer them a bonus to sign up to your email list and they’ll be more than happy to sign up because they’ll want to hear from you more often! One of my readers put it this way: you’ll be “a massive hamster-wheel-of-doom” if you don’t follow through with this important step! When you start building your list, it’s important to send emails on a regular or semi-regular basis so that your readers keep you in mind more often, and potentially will approach you and not your competitors when they need a product or service you offer.

This is something I can help you set up, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for help if you need it!

What steps do you take to help drive more traffic to your website and/or blog? I’d love to hear some of your ideas – they could help others as well, so please be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts!

When it comes to writing website content, blog posts, and even when creating social media content, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the key to being found. Having some form of keyword strategy for your website content and blog posts so that search engines know what your posts are about is very important if you want people to find you online when they look for things on search engines, whether it be using Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other option. Using keywords is part of what’s called “on-page SEO”, a very important optimization step with which anyone writing content for a site or blog should be familiar. Do you know how to implement keywords on your website or blog? If not, read on to find out more about why it’s important, and to get some free tips on how to implement a keyword strategy on your website or blog!

Why are keywords so important?

Using keywords as part of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and general blog optimization strategy will help you improve your rankings on search engines.

Why is it important to improve search engine rankings for my site or blog?

It’s important if you want your website’s content (whether they are static pages or blog posts) to come up as part of the first few pages of search results on a search engine. This boils down to your content, how well you’re using keywords, and how relevant the keywords are to your content itself. There are also some things that can be done in the backend of a website that usually a web developer would take care of for you, but those are more technical things.

Here’s a simple example that a business owner can do: if you do business locally in your area, it may be important to include local terms (city/town names, neighborhood names, etc.) near the top of some of you page content so you’ll be more likely to be found on local searches.

Okay, that makes sense… so how do I implement a strategy for optimization or using keywords?

Here are some tips to keep in mind as you’re writing a blog post or website content for different pages:

• Use keywords in your actual content (sentences/paragraphs) that are relevant to your article or page;
• Repeat the keywords in your article or page content (within reason), especially the words that you want to have best optimized (think of what people would type into a search engine to look for the content you’re posting);
• Having more than one related keyword in an article is better, and will give you more chances to be found in a search result – think of it this way: one sentence can be said in many different ways, with different words, so one person may prefer one word over another. Also, search engines are smart enough to not return too many results from your website or blog, so don’t exaggerate and have too many articles or posts or pages that are optimized for the same keywords;
• Don’t stress out too much about keywords – write your article as you want to write it in your own voice and words, but keep appropriate keywords in mind. The point here is, don’t think of keywords first then write your content – you want your content to sound natural and within context, not as if it was spewed out of a computerized function that over-analyzed your keywords (and ends up sounding too repetitive);
• Make the title of your content contains important keywords. When using an SEO plugin, for example, the title that shows up in search engine results can be set to something different than the actual title of the post or page, so this is also helpful for optimization;
• Using secondary titles within your article (such as “h2” and “h3” titles) can also help with your optimization, but again, make sure at least one keyword is in that title. An example is the questions I’m using in this article – they are enclosed in h2 tags to give them more emphasis, but they also contain the keywords I’m using in this article;
• Make sure you use your keywords in the first paragraph of your article. Think of it almost like an essay: the introductory paragraph gives the reader what the paper is about and grabs their attention, including giving them a hook in the last sentence to entice readers to continue reading;
• Keywords can be single words, multiple words, or phrases. Think of how someone would type their search query into a search engine and go from there;
• Make sure your blog is set up with what we in the industry dub as “pretty links”, technically known as “permalinks” so that your title contains important keywords, and the web address/URL for the content also contains these keywords. If you’re using WordPress, you can actually edit the permalink to be whatever you want (with no spaces, so use dashes to separate words);
• Link back to older content or posts on your site or blog (to create “backlinks” on your own website) that are related to your present article, again in a natural format;
• Using your keywords in the META description is also important. The META description is basically a brief description of the content of your page which is used as an advertisement in search results to indicate what your content is to searchers. I also do mean brief – Google, for example, only displays 160 characters, so think of the META description as a mini-ad to entice people to click on your result and read your content. If you decide to not go with a META description, search engines will extract the relevant text anyway when showing your content in search results, but it is a good idea to have one if you want to try to guide the search results to your particular keywords.

That’s a lot to remember, but I think I can start applying these keyword strategies.

Do you have any suggestions on things I should avoid?

Honestly, we’re just touching the very tip of the iceberg in this article, but you’re right – it is a lot to remember! Yes, I definitely have some tips on things you should avoid doing:

• Don’t use any irrelevant keywords. If your content is about how to replace a light bulb, Star Wars or webdesign tips would certainly not relate back to your article;
• Using too many keywords in an article is not a good idea. Use what you think if relevant to your content, and sticking to no more than 10 (maybe 15 if absolutely necessary) works well. In some cases, the fewer the better, so targeting 2-3 words can also work well. Basically, let your content and subject-matter dictate what your keywords are, but don’t overdo it – you don’t want search engines mistaking your articles for automatically-created content, and you don’t want to negatively impact your brand with your readers;
• Don’t overuse formatting for your text – you can bold certain words to emphasize them if you’re trying to make a point, but making your entire post or page bolded is not recommended;
• Don’t repeat keywords in your META tags or description;
• Do NOT place a comma separated list of keywords in your title or META description – you want your titles to be read by humans, not search engine robots, so keep things natural and human!

Do you have any additional tips or suggestions for SEO, keywords, and optimization in general?

The suggestions made are not written and stone, and are often up for debate, especially when it comes to methods for improving your search engine ranking. In fact, some will say that keywords don’t even matter and you shouldn’t ever worry about them. Personally, I wouldn’t risk going with this train of thought especially in today’s day and age because your content is competing with other websites and blogs that contain similar information, so having a good optimization plan, on-page SEO, and making use of keywords is a good strategy to use at all times. Your end-goal is to show up as a result ideally on the first page when someone searches for keywords relating to your content, so I don’t see how having a keyword strategy would hamper anyone, other than taking a little extra time to implement. If it doesn’t harm your site or blog in any way, and has potential to help you, then why not use a SEO optimization strategy?

SEO optimization is a much larger topic than just using keywords, but this is a very important part of the process. Something else you can use to help you choose your keywords are to see how many people search out a particular keyword. Google has a great tool that’s freely available to help you research different words and word combinations here:

https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

The more searches done for a keyword, the more popular that keyword is. Enter in a keyword you think you’d like to use and search away to see the results, then tweak it from there, and implement it into your content (but don’t forget, make sure it sounds NATURAL)!

One more word of caution…

Be very careful of hiring someone that makes big promises that can’t truly be delivered. A colleague recently shared a story in an online business group we’re a part of that illustrates exactly this – here’s what he told us:

“Biting my tongue hard… in coffee shop listening to a web designer going through what appears to be a discovery session with a new client.

…’put the right keywords on your home page and I can talk to Google to make sure you’re ranking at the top of the results!’

Oh my… cannot deal.”

Digital marketing people chuckle (or shake their heads) at these situations in our industry, but unfortunately, this happens all the time! There are many web designers out there who only have a minimal understanding of what SEO is and make sky-high promises that sound completely ridiculous to others who know better. We’re giving you this tip so you don’t fall into this trap!

If you need some help in this area, I can certainly consult with you and review your current website to see how it can be improved. It is impossible to guarantee your website showing up on the first page of Google for searches, though, especially because they’re always making changes to how searches work, but I do have some tips and tricks up my sleeves that will help you improve your results. Check out some of the other services I offer – I will be honest (I don’t like to make unrealistic promises) and let you know what I can and can’t do!

Do you have some thoughts on SEO, or things you’ve already learned that you’d like to share? It might help someone else – please leave me a comment and tell me what’s on your mind!