How to increase web traffic to your website

Where the bloody hell are you? Website traffic is not something you can take for granted no matter how good or how much money you have spent building your website.
 
I had an email last week from one of my hosting clients. He has set himself up with a simple website.

He has built the website, but found he has very little traffic. Increasing website traffic is a topic I get asked about a lot. This blog will cover the basics and some terminologies to help you get started.

We all use search engines to find stuff, and those websites lucky enough to be in the top of our searches get all the traffic, whilst those on page 2, 3 or greater get very little. So getting your website higher in the organic ranking (organic is the non-paid searches) is where the hard work actually begins.

There are so many companies now that specialise, in this black art, called search engine optimisation (SEO) – unfortunately most of them don’t really have a clue about search engine optimisation!

If you are ever contacted by a company or web developer moonlighting as an SEO expert, that offers you improved search performance on search engines, then there is a simple trick you can do. To put them to the test – run a simple search in Google for their site using relevant keywords (not their actual company name). If you can’t easily find them then how are they going to help you?

Here are some tips that I give to clients keen on improving website performance.

Tip 1 Measure Everything!
I mean everything. Where is your traffic coming from? What keywords are being used to find you? What’s your bounce rate? What’s your average time on site? What’s the most viewed page?

Where is your Traffic coming from?
If you are a local company and only trade within New Zealand then why do you only have a .com address? Having a .co.nz will help you search in the local pages from New Zealand – some sites are excluded from the local search because they purely have a .com.

Is your traffic bouncing?
A bounce is where someone has clicked onto your site then clicked off very quickly, it usually means they have had a quick look and decided your site was not for them. Depending on your site, a high bounce rate is a cause for concern.

What is the average time on your site?
Sites like Geekzone will have a high average time on site – because they are informative and have a large volume of information for visitors. If you have an information website like the website mentioned earlier you should be look at an average time on site over 2 minutes. This means visitors are taking the time to read your articles.


Tip 2 is anyone out there talking about you?

There are a number of free directories you can add yourself to that will promote your site for example finda.co.nz. This helps with your exposure because more sites have information links back to your site.

Please remember it’s quality not quantity. Let’s say that the New Zealand Herald wrote an article about this blog , then the NZ herald being a reputable source of information would boost the page ranking of this blog, because it’s a quality link. Once upon a time it was possible to “link whore” yourself to the top, but now the Googlebot is much smarter than that. And those types of practices can get your website blacklisted

Tip 3 – Your website name is important

I wanted to call this blog article – “where the bloody hell are you” but as much as I would like to I know the indexing on Google would have been rubbish and you wouldn’t be reading it right now. The line “where the bloody hell are you” has nothing to do with search engine optimization!

Tip 4 – Make your website GoogleBot Friendly

They say a picture says a thousand words, but to a Googlebot a picture is meaningless. If your website doesn’t have any searchable content then you are as good as dead on a search engine. Talk to your web developer about making your content as search friendly as possible!

Tip 5 – Use these free tools from Google

Google Analytics
Measure your website traffic

Google adwords
To advertise your website on Google

Google adsense
To get revenue from your website (may not be applicable)

Google webmasters
Very helpful tool for more advanced users.

Google KeywordTool
This is very helpful for measuring your keywords

Good luck- Please feel free to comment. You can contact me at richard at 3bit dot co dot nz if you would like some more information.

Please don’t comment with links to your website as I will remove them – sorry no free ride on my blog ;-)



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