This is one of the most widely asked questions on internet like on Quora, etc. Even though there are many guides out there on The Internet, still people either tend to be lazy to find out, or they might be anticipating that I might give them some tip that will magically increase their traffic overnight.
Honestly, speaking there is no one quick fix that can increase your traffic. You need to go through a lot of steps and do R&D for yourself and see what’s working for you.
As I always say Quality is the king. And there is no point in having quality content on your site when you do not have anyone to read.
An online business without traffic is like an restaurant without customers.
Broadly speaking there are three ways of driving traffic:
- Referral Traffic – Via Email Marketing, Social Media, YouTube, etc.
- Search Traffic – Through search engines. Especially, when your blog ranks on the top of major search engines like Google, you tend to drive a good amount of traffic.
- Direct Traffic – This is the idealistic scenario, and it would take a lot of time, and you need to build a very giant and unique brand to reach this stage. The way you visit sites like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.
I guess by this time you got an idea what are the different possible ways that users can visit your site. Direct Traffic is something that requires a lot of branding and generally many online businesses especially blogs take a lot of time to reach that stage. So, we will skip this off in our tutorial.
The two best possible ways to drive traffic are via Search Engines and Social Media Marketing.
How to Drive Traffic via Search Engine Optimization:
When coming to SEO, the major target would be Google. Other search engines do not have a major search volume and on the other hand, the other search engines have a different algorithm. Targeting two search engines at a time won’t be a good idea. So, for now, we will stick to Google.
Google, aim would be to show up best results on the top of the search results. In this process, they have developed an algorithm that can automatically filter good websites and show them on the top of the search results for the search query a user enters. The algorithm has about 200 different factors that contribute to the ranks of a website/blog. I won’t be listing out all of them but let you know some major factors that can help you in boosting your traffic;
Backlinks
Backlinks have always been the major factor for a very long time. They would still be an integral part of the algorithm for a very long time. Backlinks are a boon and also curse for Google. Backlinks can help in filtering the good results from the bad ones, but in this process spammers tend to abuse Google by building backlinks and outranking Google for many keywords.
Google says to focus on the quality of the content and backlinks will be generated organically. That means people will automatically link back to you if your blog has great content. But, in the initial days, no one will link back to you as you are relatively new, and another case would be you don’t have great content on your site, so other people are not at all interested in linking back to you.
My first preference will always be focusing on Quality content and try to generate backlinks organically. There are some strategies that can help you grow organically. This is not just an ethical practise but also makes sure your blog lasts long.
Tips for Organic Link Building – InfoGraphics, Making Videos, Content Marketing, Guest Blogging.
The other way is building links for yourself. Often, considered as a black hat practise and can lead you in serious trouble in long run.
Black Hat Link Building Methods – Buying links from Fiverr/SEO Clerks, Paid posting, Paid Guest Posting, Article submissions, Directory Submission, Site Wide Links, Blog Commenting.
Move to HTTPS
Google has recently made it clear that SSL is one of the ranking factors. So, make a move right now.
AMP – Accelerate Mobile Pages
This is similar to Instant Articles. People who moved to AMP have an unfair advantage over others. Google shows up these results on top for mobile users.
- Know more about the AMP Project.
Proper Title, Permalink and Meta Description:
Most of the webmasters tend to leave the title and description default. But, that won’t help you in getting the maximum benefit. You need to have a custom permalink and a Google Search Title and Description. For this purpose, I would recommend Yoast SEO Pugin.
Additionally, you have to no-index tags, archives and unwanted pages from getting listed in Search engines. This can also be done with SEO by Yoast.
Proper Usage of Keywords:
You should do a quick keyword research before you start writing down an article. Most of the times the keywords that people tend to search are obvious but in some cases, you have to get an idea of what keywords people are looking for in Google Search.
How to Drive Traffic from Facebook?
Driving traffic from Facebook is relatively easy and as we all know that Facebook has crossed 1.2 Billion users. So, there is a huge opportunity for you to make use of the same. Along with this Facebook is a little liberal and more inclined towards businesses.
You can have your own Groups, Pages to promote your products or website.
The best way to achieve this is through building Facebook page(s). If you have a good Facebook page with a decent reach, then you can promote your blog links on that page and drive traffic.
As you can see above we have shared one of our articles on our page and the audience who are interested in the article, will follow the link and visit the forum.
The other potential traffic sources are Twitter, Google Plus, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Quora, etc.
Another topic is Email Marketing. All you have to do is collect the emails of the people who are visiting your blog via some marketing software like Aweber, MailChimp, GetRespose, etc. Mail them on a regular basis about your latest updates. Email marketing works only in a long run and doesn’t give you results instantly. You should have a lot of patience in this process.
How to Drive Traffic via Social Media?
Social Media is vast these days and almost everyone on Internet use some or the other social media network. It might be Facebook, Twitter, Quora, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr or Stumbleupon. All these platforms can drive a massive amount of traffic.
The major area which you can focus on driving traffic via Social Networking sites is Facebook.
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