Creating a website is challenging, no matter whether it is a personal blog, ecommerce site or informative websites. But, your challenges do not end with launching your website, you need to get visitors to the website. The main objective of any website is to get people to visit the site and see what it offers. No matter how clean, appealing or informative your website is, it won’t serve its purpose if it does not reach the target audience. Trying to build an audience can be frustrating and even getting the first hundred visitors for your website may seem difficult. Your marketing strategies need to focus on acquiring new visitors from different sources and also ensure that visitors keep returning to the website.

 

When you talk about generating traffic for your website, you need to ensure that the traffic generated is genuine. There are some Search Engine Optimization techniques used by marketers to generate large volume of traffic for websites, but the traffic generated is mostly irrelevant. Generating irrelevant traffic does not solve your objective of reaching quality audience and won’t be able to establish popularity or brand awareness of your website. Here are the ways of increasing genuine traffic to a website -

  • While building a website, you need to keep Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. Most of the genuine traffic for a website comes from search engine results. With innumerable websites present online, it is difficult for new websites to mark their presence. If the website appears beyond the first page of search results, probability of users finding your website is very less. Hence your efforts should be directed towards improving visibility of the website in search results. It is important to setup an highly optimized website and there are small ways that can influence the ranking of your website.      
  • Do not leave your blog or website unattended after launching it. Make sure you keep posting and updating your website regularly. When you regularly post fresh content, visitors will look forward to check what new you are going to offer on the website and keep returning to the website.
  • Content is the king when it comes to websites. So, make sure your website gives quality and in-depth content. When a website provides quality content, it results in higher proportion of returning visitors. Remember, quality is more important than volume, so instead of concentrating on posting huge number of posts, emphasize on quality of content. Higher quality of content, higher is the visitor engagement.
  • Quality content not only helps in engagement, but also in search engine rankings if composed properly. So, while composing content for a website, make sure each post contains proper and well defined keywords.
  • Always target the right keywords as the keywords help in establishing relevancy of the content with search terms. Also, ranking for irrelevant keywords is the biggest put off. Visitors are disappointed if they land on a website and find it irrelevant to what they were searching for.
  • Metadata of a website is an important element for search engine ranking. Research for keywords and their search volume while defining metadata of your website. Do not publish any post without relevant meta description, keywords and description.
  • Engage in different varieties of content for your website. From blogs and informative posts about your services and products to details about the company, there are different kinds of content to interest genuine visitors.
  • Content does not only mean lengthy text content. Images play an important role in user engagement and increasing your ranking. Make sure that images chosen are relevant and give proper titles and descriptions to the images.
  • In most cases, websites do not rank due to lack of authorization. One quick way to get authorization is focusing on keywords and ranking on them. If you are new, it is smarter to focus on low searched and low competitive keywords and rank for them, instead of trying to compete for high competitive keywords.
  • If your website contains that people will enjoy, it is easy to go viral or become popular. Social bookmarking is an easy way of making content popular with the online audience. Basically, social bookmarking websites allows its users to bookmark their favorite sites and also allows sharing of bookmark with other users. As bookmarking a website hardly takes few seconds, it is quick and easy way to increase reach of your posts. Use popular bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg and Delicious as a platform funnel traffic towards your website.
  • Increase your online presence by commenting in popular and top rated blogs. But make sure, your comment is genuine and relevant. Do not spam comment section of other blogs by posting irrelevant or single line comments.
  • On your website, add insightful blogs about the market conditions, market leaders and latest happenings in the industry. It helps in building reputation amongst the competitors and builds trust with the visitors.
  • Now-a-days, social media is an inseparable part of online marketing strategies. But, not many are aware that social media can also be utilized to direct traffic to the website. Create Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Pinterest boards and profiles of other social networking sites. Share links to your website on these social media platforms.
  • You can also join groups, communities and follow top people in your industry using social media platforms. Participate in the groups, publish posts and take part in conversations that take place in the groups and communities. You can also share posts made by others to increase your networking and presence. 
  • For increasing traffic to your website, also work on increasing traffic to your Facebook pages. More followers and user engagement on your Facebook pages will indirectly increase flow of traffic to your website.
  • Improve your website in terms of usability and design. Make sure the pages load fast and even mobile websites are effective, properly designed and easy-to-use. If websites do not load properly, it turns off the visitors and they won’t return to the website.
  • Advertising is a great way of directing users to the website. You can use any form of online advertising on the pages to ensure a positive experience for the visitors.
  • Choose third-party service providers to increase traffic to your website and critically monitor reports generated by them.
  • Submit XML sitemap of your website to Google webmaster. The site map informs the search engine about the structure and size of your website, and makes crawling easier.

Remember, increasing visitors to your website is not an one-time activity. You need to continuously work on your website, its SEO and content to ensure regular flow of visitors to the site. Do not expect immediate results as your efforts won’t pay off overnight. Keep striving to improve your website and you will be able to witness the results within few months.