How to Increase Website Traffic and Google Search Ranking

Every webmaster in the web has one and only major target, i.e. increasing more traffic on their website. No matter which kind of website it is, everyone needs to increase website traffic. At the very beginning, it might look very easy but as you dig deep into this, you are going to realize it is not as easy as it looks like.

Almost every week Google, the search engine giant tweaks their search algorithm to give better search experience to their users and to give good ranking to them, who actually deserves it. Also before starting the post, you have to understand that there is no shortcut to make a website popular or to increase the targeted traffic towards your site.

Today in this post I’m going to share some tips which will help you to increase targeted legit traffic on your site and to make it popular. Also, due to high explanation, this is going to be a long post.

Traffic can be generated in many ways nowadays, but not all traffic is going to help you or your site to be popular especially in the eyes of search engines. The tips I’m going to share are completely legit and used for only bring targeted user who will be a part of your site.

For better understanding, I divide all my tips into FOUR border categories as – Creating Traffic, Borrowing Traffic, Purchasing Traffic & Proper Technical Standards.

Creating Traffic

This is one of the most popular approaches to increase website traffic and this approach is being used by most of the startup business, bloggers and other business organization.

The best part of this approach is, it almost takes no money to do this but it takes a lot of effort.

But make sure that the traffic which gets generated by this approach are the most loyal one and return back to your site. So, here are some tips that how you can create traffic for your site.

1. Write Good Content

Most of the startup site I visit and many of my client’s site I’ve seen that they just built a website or a blog just because they have to or to make money online quickly.

When I visit most of the startup blog I see that there is a bunch of articles written about almost anything he/she can think of and don’t have ZERO quality score.

Most bloggers write almost 1 article in 2 days just to increase the number of article on their blog. This doesn’t work for the long run.

Google gives preference to a blog which has less content but each of them is quality content rather than a site have huge content but users don’t care about any of them.

So, try to write your posts such a way that when someone reads it they are going to enjoy every bit of it and eventually share your post with others or will post a comment or even return back to your site for more great contents.

2. Choose Quality not Quantity

As I was saying earlier many bloggers produce a huge amount of content rather than putting some quality in it. Trust me, this kind of content or site will neither help you to earn anything nor help you to gain more readers.

Try to write quality articles on your blog. Try to do in-depth research before writing about it.

Don’t just write an inspired article (article inspired by others written article, a smart alternative of copyright infringement) or an article copied from other’s idea.

Write your own quality and unique content to get notified by search engines and to get more organic traffic to your site. If you feel that you can write 1 article in 2 or even 3 months then so be it, but make sure it worth reading.

3. Write an article which has Future Valuation

I’ve seen many bloggers to write an article about things which are mainly trendy. If you are willing to get more traffic in an exponential rate, try to write an article about something which will be static for a long period. So that you don’t lose traffic with time.

Generally, trendy keywords, posts, and sites rank goods automatically and also get decent visitors, but as times goes on, that article becomes no more an element for reading so people don’t visit it and you lose traffic.

I will suggest you write posts about things which will be as fun to read after 3 – 4 years and this will keep getting good traffic in the future too.

4. Interact with your Users & Keep them, Happy

When any user post comments on your site, it became your responsibility to answer their questions and to interact with them as you interact with your Facebook friends.

Try to answer your user’s query as soon as they post them. If you keep your readers happy then they will spread the good experience with their friends and will also suggest them to visit your site. This brings a lot of traffic to your site and post. Just because the readers to comment on your post doesn’t pay you, it doesn’t mean that you are not going to interact with them.

I’ve seen many bloggers neglect their user comments unless he/ she must have to rely on some specific comments. Don’t be that evil person. Be friendly with your users. Try to understand their behavior and always keep them happy. This step will generate a lot of traffic on its own.

5. Use Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a really awesome tool for every webmaster to make your site get indexed easily by Google.

Just login to Google Webmaster, add your site, verify it and add your sitemap. That’s all you need to do. Rest will be handled by Google.

It will also show you the message on your webmaster dashboard if Google finds any potential problem with your site.

6. Engage yourself in Forums & other Blogs

One of the best ways to increase website traffic is to engage in so popular forum and blogs of the same niche. Don’t do it for getting more and more backlinks, do it for interacting with people.

Suggest them to visit your site if you have something similar to offer. But make sure if anyone land on your page, it is worth visiting the page, so write good quality content.

Nowadays almost every site, blog, and forum use  rel=”nofollow”  on the links posted by the users so that PageRank won’t flow inside them, but this is not about PageRank or backlink it is all about getting good traffic.

If you can’t find any blog or forum of your niche, I will always suggest you engage with the users of Yahoo Answer. A great place to help others and to get traffic. If you know the answer, just answer the question, also if you have something similar on your site, ask the user to view it for more.

7. Go the Seminars and Give Free Speech

This is a very good way to gain a lot of traffic easily. If you join any local community related to your niche, they have group talk and seminars very often. Try to give some speech on any of those seminars or group talk.

Discuss a specific topic which your audience will like and enjoy and in the end you ask your audience to visit your website for more related posts or for your contact information.

If you are a good speaker and can attract your audience, you can gain a lot amount of traffic from every seminar speech of yours. You can even engage your users over twitter at the time of your speech. But if you can do it perfectly it will help you a lot.

8. Ask for Newsletter Subscription

I’ve seen many bloggers who do not take subscribers seriously and do not offer a good way to subscribe to their newsletter. Newsletter Subscription is one of the most important things to get returning users.

Any user subscribes for a newsletter when the approach is interesting and also he/she likes the website and its content. So, they want to keep in touch with your site. Don’t neglect them. The more subscriber you have the more returning visitors you are going to get and your site is going to be popular.

If you are hosting your site over WordPress I will suggest you try out the OptinMonster plugin. They have great options designs along with many other features to engage more users and to get more subscribers. If you also use MailChimp free package if you are not willing to pay now. These are great for getting more subscribers.

9. Share your Posts over Social Networks

I know that every webmaster and bloggers do this for their every post, but still, I’m saying this. Why? Because many of them do not do it in the right way. Most of the bloggers and webmasters share their site and posts to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even in LinkedIn.

But from my own experience, I’ve seen that the traffic which has the highest bounce rate are the traffic came from Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Why? Well in this sites people click almost anything they see shared or posted by any person they knew, not even knowing whether that page or post is for their need. So when they land on those sites or posts, they just simply close or hit the back button.

If you are thinking thing what is the way out, I will say try to utilize the social site most of the webmaster's neglect, i.e. StumbleUpon and Reddit. YES! Share your page and posts to these sites because the people visit these sites actually looks for the kind of things you are posting there. So, eventually, you will get some good viewers. Trust me, this will increase your traffic over than you imagine.

If you are using WordPress, I will suggest you get a plugin named Jetpack and of course to enable the modules named “Enhanced Distribution” and “Publicize”. These modules will also help you to get a good amount of traffic to your site.

Borrowing Traffic

It is actually referred to as getting traffic from others or the help of others. There are many users and organization out there who direct traffic to other sites.

Make sure every tip beyond this point might be chargeable, so unless you are ready to invest money on getting traffic to your site I will not suggest you use them.

1. Email Marketing

This is a very common term you hear on the internet if you search for SEO or generating traffic to your website. But most people don’t even know how does this works and how they will be benefited from it. These are certain individual and certain company who holds a long list of users classified into gender, demographics, age group and interest base.

So when you hire this company to do email marketing for you, generally they will create few attractive emails about your service or website and sent that to the part of the list you want to send or to the whole list of users. This varies from company to company.

There is also some individual who has a big list of a subscriber like those company and they might help you to do email marketing for free of cost (if they want). But as they are individual and have a big list of the subscriber, they do know how hard it is to create a subscriber list like that.

So, in no circumstance, they will be sent garbage emails to their users which might not look interesting to them and eventually unsubscribe that list and he/she will lose business. So, you have to convince the list owner that why should he sent emails about your business to their clients. Why it will be helpful and interesting to your users.

2. Ask others to refer you

This is a new approach which has been started recently. Generally, many bloggers with high traffic take a good sum of money to refer some other blog on their one post. People actually pay a handsome amount to get these reference as this drives a lot of traffic towards their site.

But even if they pay a good amount these bloggers are well concerned about the sites and blogs they are referring to. They audit the site very well before posting any link on their site and if they find out that this site may not be good for their users then they will not put any reference of that site.

If you have any other friend who also blog, you can also ask them to mention your site on their website. I’ve seen many blogger groups use this approach to refer to each other so that they all get good traffic.

Purchasing Traffic

This is one of the fastest ways to increase website traffic, but this is the most expensive way also.

Please make sure that here I’m not talking about purchasing traffic from black hat sites who use ClickBots to generate traffic on your site and will make your site a bad site in the eyes of search engine. I’m talking about generating traffic through advertisements and campaigns.

1. Google AdWords

Google AdWords is one of the most popular advertising platforms for running CPC campaigns. Many site owners rely on AdWords for generating leads and potential users.

One of the biggest advantages of AdWords is that it has a huge community of AdSense publishers who will deliver your advertisement campaign around the world, to billions of people visiting these sites right now.

2. Facebook Ads

If you are running a website or blog or anything which is targeted towards a specific group of people or even for a specific age group or demographic, you will not get any of these features on Google AdWords.

AdWords generally shows up your ads to everyone on the web when any search happen related to your targeted keyword of the campaign. But in Facebook ads, you can filter out your ads depending upon your various requirements.

3. Others

There are many other ad publishers out there who also runs Ad Campaign, but I will suggest you use AdWords and Facebook for your ad medium as I’ve seen most conversion in these mediums.

Proper Technical Standards

This part is not about how you can Increase Website Traffic, besides what you have to do (technically) to shine as a well-developed site so that search engines and your users like you and eventually generate more traffic for your site.

1. Site Load Time

This is a very essential thing in today’s search engine war. Almost every major search engine takes the Page Load Time and TTFB (Time to First Byte) into the account for ranking sites on the search engine.

As per Google 4 seconds is the maximum time allowed to load a page. Generally, if your page takes more than 3 secs to load, most of the users are going to click on the next search result.

Try to develop your site such a way that it does not cause slow down to your site and your business. Here are some tips for making your website load faster.

• Shift your JavaScripts to the footer section of your page.
• Use the only well-compressed image on your page.
• Use only the required site of image, don’t reduce it using HTML or CSS.
• Use GZIP compressing for your webpage.
• Use proper browser cache control for static files.
• Use good CDNs like MaxCDN on your site to load it faster.
• Try to use a simple clean and minimalistic design of your site.
• Use jQuery LazyLoad if you have a lot of pictures on your site.

You can also visit the site called FeedtheBot for checking is your site if following all Google Webmasters guidelines properly or not.

2. Understand Bounce Rate

In the webmaster and SEO world, you might hear this term “Bounce Rate” any time, but I’ve seen very few people who actually understand them properly. When a user visits your website and after staying a while or immediately leave the website or press back button, then it will be counted as a bounced user. But when a user clicks another link of your website and visits another page of your site, then it will be calculated as a Non-Bounce User.

So, if you have a blog and people came to your post from a search engine then they most interested in that particular post and may not be interested in your other contents. So, after reading the post, if they leave your site, they will also be counted on the bounced user. That is why it is better to concentrate on Page On Time in case of blogs rather than Bounce Rate.

But if you have an eCommerce site then you want your user to land on a specific product and then visit the related product also. So, in the case of eCommerce sites, lower Bounce Rate is better. If you still don’t understand Bounce Rate, take a look at this video below.

3. Use Simple & Minimal Website Design

Try to use a simple and intuitive user interface of your site. So that whenever your users land on your pages, they won’t get confused by other things, instead they can concentrate on the page or posts they have come here to visit. I’ve seen many visitors leave a webpage due to the reason of complex design and they barely understand where to start.

You might be thinking that many popular websites use rich and clumsy design then how do they get visitors? Well, the main reason is they are “BRAND”. People know them just by name. So, they are the authority site. People will try hard to understand those sites as they are authority sites. But in case of your site, you are just another blogger out there. So, don’t try to follow popular sites approaches.

4. Don’t try to Outrun Google

If you follow the BlackHat forums, you will often find many posts (better say tricks) to get instantly ranked on Google or to get a lot of visitors in a few minutes. These things are very much appealing (I know), but don’t let this post ruin your web career.

Never think yourself smarter than Google. These tricks might work for some time, but eventually, Google bots will find out about these and maybe even bad you in the search results.

5. Use HTTPS (if you can)

I know you might be hearing this first time here and also thinking that what I’m talking about, but trust me it’s true. In September 2013, Google announced that every website should consider upgrading to HTTPS and also Google has changed their search algorithm in a way that the sites which are using an SSL certificate on their site are going to get higher preference in terms of ranking in the search result.

If you are thinking that migrating to SSL is very much costly and also takes a lot of money then let me tell you that you are completely wrong. In past to install SSL you must need a dedicated IP in your site but now you don’t even need it. Using SNI you can install an SSL certificate on your shared hosting server, on your shared IP address.

So, what you need is just an SSL Certificate. Trust me SSL certificates are even cheaper than domain names. Namecheap provides COMODO Positive SSL certificate just at $9/year. After getting the certificate you have to contact your hosting provider and they will install it for you, maybe using SNI if you don’t want to pay for dedicated IP.

If you are still curious about why should you get HTTPS on your site and what steps you have to follow for getting an SSL certificate and to migrate your site to HTTPS, I will suggest you to watch this presentation video of Google IO 2014.

In my site, I also use SSL by using the SNI feature. As SNI is supported on cPanel v11.38 and above I think your host supports them. You can know more about SNI and my HTTPS migration here.

6. Use Mobile Responsive Design

Almost 40% of the web traffics are came from mobile and tablets. So, having a non-responsive website is like saying these users goodbye forever.

Because these users will never be going to visit your site by doing pinch zoom. That era is gone, keep that in mind.

7. Use Related Posts at the end

Related post is a great thing to keep your users motivated about your blog. Generally, if you do not have related post options, the user does not know where to click anymore so they will leave. Unless they see something exciting there at the end of the post.

Related Post is a great way to reduce your website bounce rate and increase the conversion rate. If you are using WordPress, there is a great plugin named Yet Another Related Post which is best for generating related posts for your blog.

8. Use Emoji to Increase User Interaction

Emoji is a great thing to increase your user interaction power on your blog. Always remember that people are very lazy, so most of them are not going to post any comment after complete reading your article. As they are lazy they either are going to visit another post of yours or going to leave.

But if you show them a set of Emojis and ask them to express their feeling about the post just by clicking on an Emoji, they are definitely going to do that, because it makes a much less effort. There is a plugin called MyEffecto which can help you to archive this on your site just by installing a simple plugin and it also works in non WordPress websites, so feel free to give them a try.

As your user share their experience with these Emoji, MyEffecto is also going to share your post in several different social networks which will give you a lot of traffic in your site.

9. Use Keyword Research Tool

Use a good keyword research tool so that you can understand what exact keyword you need to target in your content. I use AdWords Keywords Research tool which is free. There are many other keyword research tool available (free and paid) to ensure the topic you are writing, people actually search about them.

Conclusion

This might be the longest post I’ve written on my blog, but if you read this post carefully, I can assure you that it will help you to generate a lot of potential traffic for your website. All the tips I’ve shared above are personally used by myself on my own site and my client’s various websites.

So, don’t worry about legitimacy. Use my experience tips on your site to generate traffic for your website or to increase website traffic. As these tips are completely WhiteHat and legitimate, it might take some time to show the results. But always remember the key to good traffic and popularity is Good and Quality Content, not quantity.

Feedback

Please let me know if my long post helps you to get more visitors to your site. Do you use any other trick to increase website traffic?

Do you think I’ve missed any points? Let me know your story and if my post helps you in the comment section below. I’ll be happy to hear from you guys.