Do you have your own website? Are you receiving a lot of traffic? Here are a few tips on increasing website traffic using some very simple methods that won’t cost you anything but some of your time.
1. Choose your words carefully – do a little research before you write to figure out how people might be searching for the information that you’re providing. You can use a free tool such as DigitalPoint’s Keyword Suggestion Tool to try a few words or phrases that you think make sense, to identify the most frequently searched terms for your topic, then be sure to use those terms in your article a few times. This will help your pages get found when people are searching for those terms.
2. Grab readers with your titles – your article titles should be attention getting – intrigue them to want to read more when they stumble across a link to the title of one of your articles. Here’s a good blog article all about writing good headlines & titles. Remember, there’s a lot of competition for eyeballs on the ‘net – you only have an instant to make someone decide if they will click on your link or not.
3. Contribute to your community – Visit other blogs and sites within your niche and contribute to the ongoing conversation by commenting on their articles. When you post comments on other sites, it gives you a link back to your site, and these links will help people to find your site. Be sure that your comments offer some value, such as a unique perspective or insight, or some helpful tip, so that your comment is welcomed and not considered “comment spam”, which many site/blog owners will just delete. It is considered very bad form to simply post a brief “great article – thanks!” simply in order to get a link. If you can’t contribute, find a site where you can. The same goes for discussion forums – If you can help others with your knowledge and experience, by all means do so and use the opporunity to link back to your own site in your forum signature. If you can’t help, don’t just post “good question – I’ll be interested in learning the answer”, just for the link. It’s not appreciated and will generally just be removed by the forum moderators.
4. Offer to write guest articles for other blogs, and ask other bloggers to contribute guest articles on your site. Stick within your field of interest, or have a regular guest article from experts in other (but still related) fields that would naturally be of interest to your readers;
5. Write reviews of products used by your target audience (if you have personal experience of those products, such as a digital camera that you use when you travel) – often others are grateful for an opinion on an item before they buy it and will spread the word on your review;
6. Promote your site or blog in your email signature – just below your name, add a link to your website, with a short sentence encouraging email recipients to visit your site;
7. Make sure your site or blog offers an RSS Feed, and subscribe to it yourself (it’s a great way to make sure your feed looks good to others). Make the link to subscribe obvious and encourage people to subscribe and not miss out on your great content.
8. Set up your own personalized iGoogle page, and add your site’s RSS feed to your home page – it’s a good way to make sure Google scans your blog frequently. The same goes for Yahoo and MSN homepages – add your RSS feed to their feed reader function to be sure they are scanning your site as well.
9. Don’t be afraid to ask for links – when you find a relevant site that you like, ask their site admin if they would consider linking to your site. Be sure to find an appropriate place on your own site to link back to them in return. However, a word of caution: Stay away from “link farms” or paid linking schemes, in particular the offers for “triangular” links you may get (where you link to one site and a completely different site links back to you). These are generally considered by many to be underhanded techniques, and you’ll eventually be penalized for them, so you’re much better off to just build your inbound links slowly from relevant sites.
10. Subscribe to OUR RSS feed for this category “Getting Readers” – we regularly post advice and tips on additional ways to get people to your site – don’t miss out!
Remember, getting people to come to your site is far easier than keeping them there, or convincing them to come back for repeat visits. It’s up to you to keep good, fresh, relevant content that will keep them coming back on a regular basis.