Increase Website Link

Let me know if this sounds vaguely familiar. You started off with a desire – a shred of an idea that kept you awake at night. After wracking your brains, you decided to pour the idea into a plan, perhaps after reading motivational text such as Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

With the plan in hand, you went ahead and made an effort of transmuting the dream into reality. You went to work, purchased web hosting, a domain name, a great WordPress theme and set up your first WordPress site.

You were going to make it, you could feel it in your gut. Your eyes were green; you could make a killing eventually, and live your dreams. But the plan was somewhat flawed, since it didn’t account for traffic generation, the only lion barring your road to success today.

You nearly panicked when you discovered your folly, but still, you kept at it, researching and arming yourself with new information on traffic generation. Still, the numbers just weren’t there. You kept wondering what in the name of Santa happened to “build it and they will come.” What could you have done wrong?

You started doubting whether you could turn your young blog into a successful website without the quintessential ingredient that is web traffic. You quickly figure out this is impossible, and drop that line of thought.

Yet you’re not a quitter, so you could not imagine putting the tools down and closing shop. Perhaps you had no other option, so closing down wasn’t really an option after all. Well, don’t worry at all if this doesn’t sound like you, because much of it is my very own story.

Perhaps you’re just here because you would like to learn a few things on how to drive more traffic to your WordPress site. Perhaps you’re here because the few hits you’re getting won’t just cut it. You want more, and you want it now. Perhaps – just like yours truly – you started with a flawed plan, and a few months down the line – you found yourself here. Maybe, you haven’t even started. You can learn how to start a blog in minutes.

Whatever reason you are here, today is your lucky day as you will learn ~~almost~~ everything you need to drive more traffic to your WordPress-based site/blog. Towards the end of this post, we will share a few tools you can use to generate more traffic for your website, so be on the lookout for that as well.

Enjoy to the very end and don’t forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments! We always appreciate your input 🙂 Without wasting another second on trivialities, let’s get this over and done with.

Search Engine Optimization

Hipster Writing SEO Concepts on his Note

SEO is how I broke into the world of digital marketing. Long before I discovered WordPress, I was an SEO writer. Which means I had to learn a lot about the art of enticing search engines to find content.

All the learning paid off later when I went into business for myself. Using the SEO techniques I had learned, I crafted content that ranked highly in Google, in turn earning meself a great deal of traffic to my WordPress blog.

And for a long time, Google has remained my number uno source of traffic, even after I discovered guest blogging, and reduced the frequency of posting on my own blog. This led to my concluding that SEO is the best way of attracting web traffic. It’s easy work albeit it takes time, and anybody with a little knowledge and some passion can hack it.

How?

First off, for the sake of absolute beginners, it’s paramount to mention that SEO involves optimizing your content (as well as your entire site) to make it easily discoverable in search engines such as Google. That’s all there is to it.

The objective is to appear in the first ten (10) positions in search engine result pages (SERPs). Best, of course, is to come first.

Secondly, SEO is broken into two categories namely on-page and off-page SEO. The former involves every SEO activity you perform on your own site and the latter involves SEO activities that involve third party websites, hence the terms on-page and off-page respectively.

To drive more traffic to your WordPress site, you need to approach SEO in its entirety. You should engage in both on-page and off-page SEO. But, what do you need to do technically speaking?

Keyword Research

Astute keyword research is the foundation of great SEO. When users have a pressing problem (call it a need), they will rush to their favorite search engine with the hope of obtaining a solution.

They enter words or phrases into the search engines, hit enter and if your content is optimized with these terms, you’re given preference. What I mean is if you’ve done your work really well, Google and other search engines will display your content first, earning you traffic.

If you look at it critically, you immediately realize that you must know the keywords or key phrases that people are using to find your business as well as products. This is where keyword research comes in.

Once you determine these keywords/phrases, you can add them to your content in order to improve your chances of appearing first in search engines. If you play your cards right (which just means following these SEO Guidelines), you will always score top positions in SERPs, and earn yourself more traffic.

If you keep at it – publishing SEO-ready blog content consistently and implementing the other recommended SEO techniques – you will continue enjoying top rankings and more traffic for days, months and years to come. For instance, I still rank well for the phrase “latest SEO techniques and trends” thanks to a post I published two years ago. What a shameless plug. Haha.

But how do you tackle this animal called keyword research? Where do you begin? You can begin your journey with a tool such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. With a primary keyword in mind, you can bank on Google AdWords Keyword Planner to determine the search volume and generate more keyword ideas.

Blog ideas can come to you as well as you carry out your keyword research, so the rewards are many. Other tools include Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Keyword Tool, WordTracker and SEMRush among others.

Armed with your keywords, you’re primed to create awesome content that will show up in search engines. The ideal keyword density to aim for is 2.5%, meaning if your blog post is 1000 words long, your keyword should appear about 25 times naturally. Don’t go beyond 4.0%, because Google will think you’re just spamming.

Additionally, make sure you add your keyword to your page title, preferably at the beginning. Keywords in your subheadings count as well, so don’t forget that as well. Add your keywords to your URLs as well so search engines can pick them up easily. That’s not the end of it. Throw a few keywords to your image file names, and include the ALT attribute, and if possible, place your keyword in the ALT as well.

Every post or page you publish should have headings, tags and meta descriptions because search engines use this information to rank your content. Even if you’ve never created a WordPress post before, adding headings (h1, h2,h3…h6) shouldn’t be a challenge – they are all in the visual editor.

Adding meta titles and descriptions (called meta data collectively) on the other hand isn’t exactly easy. But worry not, you can easily optimize your WordPress post and pages using WordPress SEO plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast and All in One SEO Pack.

Ensure your website is visible to search engines by navigating to Settings -> Reading in your WordPress admin area, and deselecting “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.Otherwise, all your SEO efforts will be in vain.

I will leave it at that because we’ve already covered this and other SEO techniques in detail in our recent post: WordPress SEO Best Practices for 2015 and Beyond. Please check out that post if you wish to drive more traffic to your WordPress site using SEO. Moving on…

Your Interlinking Strategy

Interlinking Strategy

See how I just linked to our other post in the section above? That there is what we call interlinking. But how does this boost your traffic? It’s simple mechanics. By linking to your other posts, you give your readers the opportunity to find more of your content.

If they just read your entry post (such as this one) and left, you would register a higher bounce rate, and you would lose SEO points, and hence web traffic. You would be right to argue that search engines love natural internal linking.

At the same time, by linking to your other posts, you improve the chances of getting more of your content discovered, read and shared. When users share your content, you attract more traffic and if this keeps repeating, your traffic will only keep growing.

You can link to your other posts within your content (like we just did a few moments ago) or take advantage of related post plugins such as Zemanta or any of these related posts plugins. These plugins create a “related posts” section at the end of your post (or in the sidebar) boosting engagement, page views and ultimately, traffic.

Search This Blog

Backlinkos