How To Increase Website Traffic – 4 Essential Tasks

Over the last four years I have made all of my money by getting website traffic and turning that traffic into dollar bills. People ask me all the time how to increase website traffic, so I figured I would offer some honest, straightforward advice.

Social Traffic Isn’t Worth It, In Most Cases

If you just want to throw up huge numbers there are a lot of ways to do it. StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit can send you huge numbers of visitors. Many of you have already chased that traffic and some of you have probably succeeded. I personally have been able to get loads of traffic that way so I’m a good person to listen to on the subject. The honest truth is that it’s incredibly difficult to make money from those traffic sources. Those individuals typically have very short attention spans and will leave your site just as quickly as they found it. If you don’t believe that, I highly doubt that you’ve tried to sell to them before.

When you go through the process of learning how to increase website traffic, I want you to focus on the most important type of traffic there is – search traffic. Once a stream of traffic starts coming from Google it will come day after day after day, whether you continue working or not.

There’s only one type of person that can make social traffic work and that type of person is naturally gifted. If you are an extremely gifted writer or personality, social traffic might be an awesome fit for you. If you aren’t it’s going to be an enormous waste of time because you won’t be able to influence the short attention spans that will find you.

Search traffic is honestly a lot easier to work with. There’s a huge difference with search traffic because they are already looking for you. Since they already want what you have to offer, the process is a LOT easier.

How To Increase Website Traffic From Search Engines

Getting more traffic to your website from search engines is actually fairly easy to do. I want to keep this lesson fairly simple for you so I have organized the basics into four separate tasks:

1. Researching your market.
2. Choosing keywords.
3. Creating keyword-optimized content.
4. Getting links to your content from relevant pages.

Most people go wrong because they don’t do any research in the first place. To fully understand this process, I want you to take a look at how you found this article. You probably did a search in Google for ‘How To Increase Website’ traffic, or something similar (or you are a regular reader of mine). You found me because I anticipated that people would be searching for this, and created a solid article on this topic.

Researching Your Market

You may be curious about how I was able to anticipate that you would be doing this search. This is pretty easy if you take a look at the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You start by typing on topics that are related to the content of your site. In this case I started by searching for ‘website’ because I help people to learn to make money with websites. The tool showed me a bunch of keywords that people search for and are related to websites. Website traffic was one of the terms that came up. Since I understand a lot about getting more website traffic, it’s obviously pretty easy for me to write about.

Hopefully you can see why this article came to be. I want to be found by people who want to get more targeted website traffic.

What you need to do is use the Adwords tool to take a look at topics that people are searching for in your market. You will obviously know your market better than I would so you need to think about different aspects that people need to understand. Type those terms into the tool and take a look at what comes back. Expand on the terms that come back and you’ll probably find some winners in there.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords to me is a matter of looking at your competition and deciding how strong it is. I wrote about this concept extensively on The Keyword Academy: Choosing A Topic For A Website. I was actually talking about choosing a topic for a site, but the same concepts apply. You can use those metrics to choose topics to write about that you can realistically get ranked for.

Where most people go wrong is that they only choose the super competitive keywords that everyone else is using. Finding the easy ones will make your life a lot easier so I would definitely start there. Increasing traffic to your website becomes one of the easiest things ever when you write about topics that have weak competition.

Lately I picked up a site that’s about food and honestly it’s one of the easiest things ever. I’m barely trying and getting ranked really well. It’s so much easier than my internet marketing topics it’s not even funny. If you can try to find keywords that aren’t that competitive it will be a lot easier. Obviously you don’t want to write off topic, so your search will be limited to the scope of your website.

Creating Keyword-Optimized Content

Creating content that will rank well for a keyword is honestly really easy. I have written extensively about this and so I’ll point you to an article I wrote about this: How To Target a Keyword With a Post Page. The only thing I want to add to that is that the better your post, the better it will work. If your post excites people enough to get them to point some links at it, it will rank better and it will rank more quickly.

Getting Links To Your Content From Relevant Pages

If you’re starting out, this might seem like it’s pretty difficult but after you get going, it really isn’t. The first thing you should try to do once you create your website is find some friends in your industry. This will help you a ton because when you need to get some extra links, they will be there to help. There are also a lot of other methods that you can use. You can write articles for EzineArticles and they will allow you to link back. For that matter, you can write articles that can be submitted with Unique Article Wizard, or a similar service.

Getting links is often as simple as asking. When I started CourtneyTuttle.com, I looked through all of the make money sites on Technorati to find beginners who had sites similar to mine. I then participated on their sites and made friends with them so that we could help each other out. We have helped each other a lot over the last few years and the links we have passed back and forth have made a huge difference. Now that I have some people reading my site building links has also become a lot easier. That said, I started out with zero traffic just like everyone else and overcame that with hard work.

Related posts:

1. Cool KEYWORD Tools For Creating Exceptional Website Development Content
2. Overture gives keyword traffic data for Yahoo. Does anyone know of a free tool for Google that does the same?
3. What Is A Good Internet Marketing Service?