Everyone has a website today. Whether it’s to promote your business, share your opinions with the world or bring light to an important issue, everything that happens online happens on a website. But with so many websites up, how do you stand out and draw people to yours? Here are some tips on how to drive traffic to your site without breaking the bank:
Stay relevant
Think of it like this: people will find your website when they type in words in a search engine. And people search for topics that are current and relevant, so if your website doesn’t fall within that, you will just get lost because nobody will be looking up what you’re offering. Even if the core of your site isn’t about anything current, you can still find ways to connect it and have a few posts on the topic.
Don’t clickbait
We all know the feeling: you see a title that makes it impossible not to click on and you anxiously wait for the page to load – just to realize you’ve been clickbaited and the article has nothing to do with the title. Not only is this the fastest way to lose the trust of your followers and fans, but you will ruin your online score. If people click on your website and then click away as soon as it loads up – that is a negative mark, and all of these things matter when you talk about the placement of your website.
Take care of SEO
Speaking of placement, let’s discuss SEO. It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the most important thing you need to worry about when it comes to your site being seen by people. It’s a complete science and unless you’re an expert, you’ll be better off hiring an SEO company to handle that part. SEO takes into consideration everything that is on your site, as well as how your website is referenced elsewhere on the internet to improve your overall score. This is very important because the majority of people will never click through to the second page of Google results, so you want to make sure you are on that first page.
Update regularly
A website isn’t something you can set and forget. It is alive and you need to constantly update it with new content for it to stay relevant. If the website is dormant, your rating will fall and you can forget about good traffic. If you are lacking inspiration to post new things, you can always open it up for guest posts and get fresh content that way.
On top of all of these tips, a website alone isn’t enough and you will want to connect it and promote it through social media to reach a wider audience. Social media marketing is a science on its own, but it’s suffice to say that, unless you have people subscribed to the website or a newsletter, people will find out that you posted something new only if you let them know through other networks. So armed with this knowledge, you can make sure that the website you’ve worked hard to build and fill with content is visited and appreciated by a great audience!
Samantha Acuna is a writer based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, and Yahoo Small Business.
