Increase Website Traffic with Social Media
You need a website, but you need a lot more. Social media is THE wave of the future, today. Get on it.
There are a number of ways to increase website traffic for your website. I’ll hit on a few ways to increase website traffic in this article. What you actually DO with that traffic is a totally different topic.
Search engine optimization
You need a website that makes sense to visitors and search engine spiders alike. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps to make your site usable and sensible to visitors by creating readable pages, a good content architecture and clear display of where you are on the site. SEO also helps people find your site using search engines by identifying the keywords that your site is built on and emphasizing them in your content.
Links to your site
When an article links to a page on your website validates the quality of the information you have on that page. The more links you have to pages within your website, the more search engines see quality and importance. You want links to your site to come from sites that have similar or relevant subject matter, and ideally they’ll link on words that mirror the title of the page they link in to. Links from other websites to your pages help people visiting those sites to find your pages both directly and in search results.
Links from your site
It’s better to give than to receive…. When you link out to other websites, and you do it the right way, you’re telling that site that you like their content, you’re setting an example of good SEO, and you’re getting their attention. If someone links to my sites I’m going to find that in my referring traffic reports and I’m going to take a look at who took the time to link to me. If I like those sites I’ll link back. Search engines like this. And they like a site that receives lots of links in and sends a lot of links out. You get enough linking going on and your site will become an authority site in its niche.
Tweeting has gone corporate. We use twitter to announce our latest topics, company news and and SEO news. Use bit.ly to create short URLs linking to your individual site pages. twitter is informal – use it to spread news AND to find the good and bad perceptions of your site or company. Solve problems that people tweet about and you’ll get good press. Don’t spam or get all obnoxious with your ‘look at me’ tweets. Just do good on twitter and the twitter audience will appreciate you and follow you. And follow back – remember, it’s better to give than to receive. In fact, you can use placements on your website to highlight twitter activity that you support! It’s another form of linking that will garner your site more traffic.
Use Facebook as a media and communications point. As with twitter, use Facebook to focus on more than just your website. It’s a community – use it as such.
Bookmarking and Link Sharing sites
I follow SEO topics on Delicious, SEO topics on Propeller, and technology topics on Digg – these are sites that people post links and topics for other people to read, rank and respond to. These sites are inherently important because the posts are all done by humans. They lose some validity to the spam people post – you can’t confuse these sites with DMOZ (SEO topics on DMOZ) and the other human-managed directories. You CAN use them to your benefit by posting links to your site and building momentum by encouraging your readers to do the same. You can use widgets like AddThis social bookmarking widget and Sociable on WordPress or you can embed code from the sites directly into your site.
I’ll update this topic a lot, and post similar topics.
