For web, traffic is currency. The more traffic a site has, the greater is its value. However, gaining traffic or rather relevant traffic requires a great deal of effort and patience. It cannot be achieved in a day and needs a strategic planning. There are many best-practices that can help you to achieve higher web traffic; the following are some of them:
Content is King:
This is the basic guideline to follow if you want to survive (as well as to increase the number of traffic) in a web business. So have a strategic content planning to create an online buzz. One of the best ways to create a buzz is writing controversial articles. People love controversies; thus by writing such an article you can spark debate, which in turn, will help you to get more number of hits and links to your article. Whether or not they agree with you, the end result will surely be a huge increase in traffic. Similarly, publishing breaking news too will help you to achieve many links from other sites as well as increased traffic.
The other content strategies that are likely to increase your traffic include:
- Top 10 or Top 100 lists – They are good for generating traffic. Such lists are useful and people are likely to bookmark and share the list, allowing you to enjoy a great online exposure.
- How-To and Guides – Your visitors will love such content, as long as you give them something interesting and useful. However, such guidelines should be “definitive” and as complete as possible to make your visitors flock to read it.
- Publishing interviews of industry players and decision makers – People love to read about celebrities, be it an entrepreneur, an author, or a silver screen personality. Publishing interviews of big shots will never fail to get you some more traffic and those valuable links that the search engines refer to while evaluating the worth of your site. Better yet, ask the interviewee to put a link of the interview on his/her blog or website and you can leverage upon his/her readers as well.
- Writing about seasonal events – This can increase your site traffic dramatically. Write some valuable and useful articles about holidays and seasonal events such as World Cup, Presidential election, Christmas, etc and you will have no shortage of visitors to your site.
Optimizing Your Website:
This is much more than optimizing a site for search engines; the latter is more technical while the former needs to be more humane. Search engines evaluate a site with the help of crawlers and spiders. However, for your visitors it is their experience that helps them to assess a website. Thus, make sure your site is user friendly and easy to navigate. In addition, make them feel good about the site. For example a 404 error page will always turn off your users. Regardless of how much you hate it; such errors are likely to occur on your site. Though you can hardly do anything about it, you can customize the 404 error page including some useful links. Thus, instead of moving on to some other site, your visitors will be channeled to other parts of your site, increasing your web traffic.
Infographic – Strategies to target and increase website traffic
source – Monetate
Targeting website traffic by customer segment to improve conversion rates is done only by 25% of digital marketers today. With a little targeting know-how, marketers can begin customizing a website experience for every visitor. Targeting will benefit consumers by creating a more efficient, individually-tailored online shopping experience resulting in higher conversions.
Next, one of the most important tasks is to test the site in various browsers. Sites that work fine in Chrome may have some trouble in opening pages in Firefox. And you can never guarantee which browser your visitors are likely to use. Thus, it is important that the site works fine on almost all the popular browsers. There are several free online service providers that offer browser compatibility testing across various browsers.
Also, speed up your site. With the infinite options available, Internet users are known to have little patience. In general, most of the users will wait just a couple of seconds for your pages to load. And if it fails to do so, they are likely to move on to some other site that takes less time to load. So do not load you site with unnecessary elements that take ages to load. In addition, reduce the size of images that you are using and stay away from flash site (though they may look beautiful) as such sites take more time to load. A faster loading speed will also help you to achieve a higher search ranking.
Some other website optimization tips include:
- Highlight the popular content – Tell your visitors “what’s hot” as they visit your site. You can either brand them as Feature Articles, Popular Article or Article of the Day. This way, you will encourage the visitors to read it and thus increase your number of page views.
- Interlinking pages – It has a two way benefit. First, it will make site navigation easier for the visitors, increasing the number of pages views. Secondly, interlinking pages will distribute the link juice among all the pages, thus improving the search rankings.
- Cached pages – Serve cached versions of your website’s pages to the visitors. This will not only improve your site’s loading speed, but will also reduce the load on the web server. This, in turn, will make the website more responsive.
Finally, don’t forget to get a decent hosting plan. With a mediocre hosting plan you site is likely to load slowly, despite all your optimizing efforts.
The basic guideline to follow when it comes to achieve more number of traffic is to create unique and fresh content. Search engines, especially Google, value sites with relevant and unique content. The more unique content a site has, the better search ranking it will achieve. Also, translate the content into other languages to multiply your search engine traffic. Read more 21 tactics to increase your blog traffic here at SEOMoz
