Seven ways to increase website traffic

This is a subject we’ll return to time and time again as, of course, it’s crucial for any business. Getting people to your business' website is one of the most important challenges you face, making them do what you want once they get there is another matter (although how you get them there and what reason you’re giving them to do so can also have a major influence on their behaviour on arrival at your site).

Here are seven methods you should think about using to get more traffic to your site (or to start building traffic from scratch in the first place!):

Use your stats

Start looking at the traffic that is coming to your site (even if this is initially tiny). Google’s free Analytics tool helps you to do this. You’ll be able to see important information about how and why that traffic is coming to your site such as which keywords people are using in search engines to find you, which areas of your site they’re going to most and where the traffic is coming from. This can inform the sort of content you create for your site and how you adjust and prioritise what you’re showing them when they arrive.

Create content

Creating fresh content for your site is something that we’ve mentioned a number of times before, but it really is crucial you update your site on a regular basis as this gets picked up on by search engines and helps you climb the results page rankings. Blogs, offers, news, video, guides and tips; it all helps. Make sure you think hard about matching content with the keywords (see below).

Use keywords correctly

Think long and hard about the keywords and keyword phrases you think people will use (or are using if you have checked using Google Analytics – see above) to find your site. Match them with the meta-date keywords in your pages and the page titles, text you use on the pages, titles for articles, guides, blogs etc. This all is crucial for search engine purposes.

Tag images properly

Make sure you put in the proper alt tags and title tags for any images you use on your site with the keywords or at least one of the keywords included in the content the image is being used to illustrate.

Back linking

Whatever your business area and just about no matter how niche it is there will be websites out there related to it. On a good number of these you will no doubt be able to comment, especially in forums, blogs and discussion boards. Many will let you to leave links back to the information source for your post (your site, obviously!) or simply your site details. This can engage those interested in what you do as well as all help with SEO.

Reciprocal linking

In the same vein, these sites might be interested in linking to your site if you’ll link to theirs on their site proper (in blogs, articles, guides etc.). Two sites linking to each other from relevant content is much more powerful in terms of the way this is rated by search engines than just the one link back to your site from theirs. Approach the owners of such sites in a friendly and open way as possible, people are obviously wary and guarded about where they link to but if it’s in both your interests it could very much be worth your while.

Article directories

There is a large number of sites out there now purely dedicated to articles written in a vast number of fields and which really only exist because site owners know that for SEO purposes it’s valuable to post up articles and try and get keyword links back to your site from them. Some of these sites are given greater weight by search engines than others; you can find out what PR (page ranking) they have by using Google tools.

Even better, if you can get articles onto the most highly ranked information, news and comment sites – the national press sites being just about as good as it gets, but niche and 'local' sites can be as good – it works wonders for free PR as well as for SEO purposes.