Websites thrive when they get a lot of traffic. More users can lead to more business, more exposure, and generally more purpose for a website no matter what it specializes in. As such, it’s important to focus on the various different ways that you can draw in a wider audience. But how exactly is this done? What kind of strategies can you use to increase the number of visitors to your website? In this post, we’re going to take a look at some of the best ways to attract more people to your pages.
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Understand how Google works and take advantage of it
Google is the most-used search engine in the western world. As a search engine, it has an algorithm that it uses to index certain pages and also rank them based on what a user searches. Pages that rank higher are usually more informative, contain less spam and have a variety of media such as images and videos. Pages that aren’t helpful to their visitors, have loading issues, or even have broken links, tend to be less popular with Google and will receive a lower rating. This is the basics of how Google works and what you should be focused on to increase web traffic. However, you can go even deeper than this if you wanted to.
For starters, learning about the changes that Google goes through could help you alter your content or put priorities on different things. The new spam update that Google just received might change how you rank certain types of content, and it could change the way you publish content on your website. You might also want to stay updated with the way Google treats mobile-friendly pages and their comparisons with desktop pages. These days, Google tends to favor websites that do both, so it’s helpful if you can prepare desktop and mobile-friendly pages.
In short, understanding things like Google ranking factors and how the algorithm works can greatly improve web traffic numbers. Don’t worry about understanding the exact intricacies of search engines because these are designed to be hidden. Instead, focus on providing a good browsing experience for your visitors. The golden rule is to make a website good enough that you’d want to use it every day, so make sure you do plenty of testing as well.
How important is it to optimize your content?
Optimizing your content is generally seen as one of the best ways to draw in a wider audience. While this is true for the most part, it’s actually more important to focus on how your website is seen in the first place. If your website is fully optimized for SEO but you don’t already have a large number of visitors, then stuffing keywords and adding content generally won’t help much. This is because your website isn’t being seen by people already. It’s not being linked to on social media, and people aren’t talking about it on message boards like Reddit.
You see, for a website to appear on Google it needs to be trusted and validated by other users. For example, a website that is linked to many times on social media and online community forums. People enjoy a specific website because it offers affordable products for a niche hobby. More and more people learn about it via searching on Google, and it eventually appears on a search result because it’s a trusted place according to how many times it has been linked to. This system can’t really be abused like it used to, which is why having multiple forms of validation via different platforms is so useful.
So how exactly do you get your website discovered on the internet?
One of the best ways would be to start posting it in places that are relevant. For instance, if you find a thread on Twitter or any other message board that is looking for a particular type of product or service, then why not post a link to your website? You could even make a YouTube account for your website and post videos on it to help discoverability, and you could also be active on social media with your brand’s official account. Doing things like this helps to spread the word about your brand, services, and products.
While this isn’t the only way to get noticed, it certainly helps a lot during the early stages of your business. Optimizing is no doubt important, but if you only have a few pages on your website then optimizing isn’t nearly as effective as getting your website out into the open.
Does your website also need to look good?
A common question that people ask is; does my website need to look good in order to attract an audience? The short answer is no; you don’t need a website to look good if you want to draw in lots of people. The focus point should always be the content, so make sure you have plenty of good articles, production descriptions, and other forms of content on your website for your audience to see and consume. Failing to do this can make your website seem more like a form-over-function website, and this usually doesn’t do well. In fact, it’s fairly common for some websites to create an over-engineered website that fails to deliver any tangible value. It could be hard to navigate due to an abundance of visual effects, and it might even load slowly on certain devices due to all of the animations and graphics used.
In other words, don’t focus on the design as much as the content. A website can look like it’s from the 1990s but still get more traffic than a modern website as long as it provides value in the form of content. A beautiful website can be cool to look at, but there’s no reason to look at it for too long if it doesn’t provide value. Ideally, you should have both, but if you need to make a compromise, don’t hesitate to focus more on the content side of things.
