I frequently get e-mails from different people asking how to get traffic to their website. Or sometimes they ask why they’re not able to get traffic despite their best efforts.
Below are the five most common reasons people struggle to get traffic to their website.
1. You have no content
Probably the most common reason people have trouble getting traffic long term is that they have no content that is of any value to other people.
Their websites are full of advertisements and have little else to offer.
Anyone visiting this kind of website would not stay for more than one or two seconds.
And that visitor would not bookmark this site and certainly wouldn’t come back. And they won’t tell their friends about it.
So this website owner is left with the difficult task of constantly finding new people to come to his website and who will then immediately leave.
Definitely not a recipe for success.
Put content on your website that is useful to others. Make it so good that they want to bookmark it and come back and refer their friends.
2. Long download times
It seems these days that everyone has high-speed Internet but this is not the case. There are still lots of people with a dial-up connection and a short attention span. Believe it or not there are still some people stuck in 1999 and these people will not be willing to wait 10 or 20 seconds for your website to load.
If your website takes too long to load you are losing visitors.
In previous posts like covered website load times and some tools you can use. You can read that here.
3. Search engine optimization
There are still a few websites out there that have not been optimized for the search engines. They have not put their keywords in the title tags and H1 tags and done all of that stuff.
If you want a summary of search engine optimization and what you should do you can read my tutorial here.
4. Spreading the word
Okay so you have great content that people will absolutely love. Now it’s time to spread the word.
There are a variety of ways to spread the word. You can:
- Start a twitter account, get a few followers, and then tweet about new posts or updates to your website. Read more about how to get started on twitter here.
- Posting on forums is another way to spread the word about your website. Read tips and tricks on forum postings here.
- If you have a website on a topic that you are interested in then chances are that you have friends that are interested in that topic too. Tell your friends about your site and ask them to link to you.
- Submit your RSS feeds to various RSS feed aggregators. Read more about this here.
- Modify your e-mail signature so that it has your website address and a four word description at the bottom of each e-mail you send.
- Build a list of people interested in your content and then e-mail them every time you update your content.
5. Make it easy for others to spread the word
If you have truly great content some of your visitors will naturally want to share with others and so your job is to make this as easy as possible for them.
This can be a bit tricky and you don’t want to overdo it.
I used to have buttons at the bottom of every post so that you could submit that post to delicious and stumble upon and 10 zillion other social bookmarking websites. What I found is that no one clicks the buttons and I find them kind of distracting. So I removed them.
One of the things I have found to be successful is the little twitter icon at the top of every post (including this one).
This is a simple plug-in for WordPress that you can find here:
http://www.backtype.com/plugins/tweetcount
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the links in your no.3 (SEO) I am navigating there now for the tutorial.. thanks!
People say adding new content helps your site, how often do you think i should do that? Every day or once a week?
There is no hard and fast rule. More often is better but focus on quality not quantity. High quality will get 100x more traffic than a low quality post.
Content is an important factor in the promotion of a site. More creative and original You sound more beneficial it is.
No matter what it is the content is important and most of all it should be in simple language..
Simple language is definitely an important key. Not everyone has a college education and wants to decipher obtuse language.
if you have a the site content nicely written and its not understandable by the end user..then no point..the content should be composed in such a way that a common man is able to read and understand
Nick wrote:
“If your website takes too long to load you are losing visitors”
Matt Cutts of Google mentioned in his blog that load times are one fo the about 200 factors for ranking a site/page. The faster – the better.
Nick, can you please add the URL for Matt Cutts blog post manually as I have problems posting his URL here. Thanks.
The blog post dates from April 9, 2010 and is called:
“Google incorporating site speed in search rankings”
Here it is: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/