5 Super Easy Tips To Grow Your Web Traffic

 

The world of the internet can seem a little daunting when you are just starting out with your website. It can be easy to assume that once you have your website up and running, you can simply sit back and wait for the customers and orders/ bookings to roll in… unfortunately this is not the case! To gain web traffic to your website requires some effort in order to grow your website. 

 

 

As well as having a stylish efficient user-friendly website, you need to help people to find it if you want to generate some business!

So I have compiled a list of 5 super easy steps for you to take if you have recently launched your website/ blog, to help you to grow web traffic!

 

This link is for the Yoast plugin, which as well as providing a sitemap for your website, it also has loads of great features and tips to help you improve the overall SEO on your website/ blog. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

This link is the Google Sitemap plugin, which automatically generates an XML sitemap for your WordPress website, and helps search engines index your blog. https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-plugin/

Once you have your sitemap, you can go to each of the popular search engines; Google, Yahoo and Bing. Inside their Webmaster tools area, you need to create an account for your website and verify that you are the website owner. To do this, usually, the search engine will display a piece of code that you need to copy and paste into the head section of your website. Once you have done this, the search engines will see this code and verify you as the website owner. Once you have done this, you will be able to access the webmaster tools to help grow your web traffic, and submit a sitemap to the search engine.

Submitting a sitemap is crucially important if you ever want your website to appear in search engines results pages, which is one of the major ways that users find websites.

This is important if you have recently launched/ currently own a website with no blog page.

 

There are still people who don’t understand the value of having a blog page and perceive it to be a waste of time for business, however, having a blog page on your website is so important for web traffic and here is why;

 

 

 

– Once your website sitemap has been submitted, search engine ‘bots’ will crawl your website, with the intention of analysing it for search engines results pages.

 

Search ‘bots’ will rank a website higher in the search engine results pages if the website is ‘alive’. Basically, this means that by regularly adding new content to grow your website and editing your website pages, search engine ‘bots’ can see that you keep your website updated, and so your website will rank higher.

 

One of the easiest ways to regularly update your website content is by having a blog page.

– Having a blog page can be a great platform to use to connect with your customers/ audience, and help to build a community around your business. This can be done by sharing a variety of blog post styles such as; funny business facts, latest customer reviews, or you can ask for customer feedback about a new product/ service that you are planning on offering. This can be very effective to build a following for your business.

–  Finally having a blog page can help to generate more business. E.g. if you create a post giving more information about one of your products/ services, perhaps a demonstration/ instruction, this can provide customers with more information on your product and encourage them to purchase from your business.

 

If you aren’t already on social media, they are a great way to spread awareness of your website and generate web traffic.

 

There are many different social media platforms aimed at different users.

 

E.g. if you predominately want to share images, Instagram would be a great social network for this. Whereas Facebook is a great social network to share with family, friends and the local community.

 

Sharing your website on social media will also provide more ‘back-links’ for your website. This is an example of off-page SEO (search engine optimisation) and will help to improve your website ranking on search engine results pages.

 

 

By adding a social sharing feature to your website, as you can probably imagine, helps users visiting your website to share an element of your website onto different social media platforms.

 

For e.g. an image from your website, a blog post article, or a page from your website.

 

This is a great online marketing tool because once you have integrated the social sharing feature, you can let your website visitors do the sharing for you. Also by having your website shared on social media sites, not only promotes your website, business and services to the community, but it also creates more back-links for your website, which in turn helps its ranking on search engines results pages.

For website/ blogs using WordPress, there are a number of free plugins available, to enable social sharing, including;

Shareaholic, including free and premium plans; https://wordpress.org/plugins/shareaholic/

 

 

The internet is full of spammers, malware, bots and hackers. It is important to conduct regular backups of your website/ blog to help to protect it against any potential threats.  If your website/blog does experience any cyber threats/ hacking, and you don’t have a recent backup to restore your website, you will wish that you had backed it up!

Below are some WordPress plugins that I recommend for backing up your website/ blog. You can choose how often you would like to back up your website e.g. daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly etc. It depends on how often you edit your website, to how often to carry out site backups. I usually back mine up weekly.

UpdraftPlus provide free and paid versions, https://updraftplus.com/?afref=154

BackWPup, a popular WordPress plugin with both free and premium options, https://wordpress.org/plugins/backwpup/

 

 

How did you find these 5 super steps to grow web traffic? Do you presently use any of these steps on your website?

Have a great day!

Emily