Traffic is the currency of the network. The more traffic your website has, the easier it is to achieve your stated goals: make money, spread your ideas, connect and interact with other people, or any other purpose. That’s why I wrote this article on 100 Ways to Increase Website Traffic. Just use some (or most) of the following methods and you're guaranteed to see a significant increase in your traffic.
blog
If the website is static (Tristan: a company website or an online store, for example), consider adding a blog and updating the content regularly. Not only will this attract repeat customers, but it will also get more traffic from search engines. You need blogging software, of course WordPress. (Free and easy to use)
1. Add a blog to your website.
2. Leave a message on other people’s blogs. Make a habit of visiting blogs in your niche target market and leaving comments. You will be allowed to leave a link in the comments, and some visitors may click to your website from there. Check out what blogs are in your niche by visiting Alltop.
3. Submit reader contributions. Most blogs welcome contributions from readers. Bloggers allow you to submit articles to them, and usually the articles will retain the author's byline and point to your website. Just send the article to the blogger and see if he will publish it as a reader contribution. It's that simple.
4. Sponsor a blogging contest. A popular practice in the blogosphere is running blogging contests. You can sponsor a contest, offer prizes or bonuses, and bloggers will leave a link to your website on the contest page.
5. Attend a blog carnival. A blog carnival is an online event where bloggers get together to write about a certain topic. Carnival organizers usually write a summary article at the end, which provides article links to each participant. At the same time, participants usually link to each other's article pages. You can organize a carnival with friends, or find one taking place on BlogCarnival.com.
6. Build a network of relationships. There is a saying that “it’s better to know the right person than to have the ability.” This also applies to website promotion. After you make friends with bloggers and webmasters, they will be happy to put a link to your website and bring traffic. But before that, you should probably link to their website or contact them via e-mail.
subscription
7. Publish rss feed. Publish RSS feeds to facilitate readers to subscribe to the blog through RSS readers. In this way, whenever the blog is updated, they will be automatically notified of the update. This is a good way to ensure that they can read the updated articles and encourage them to visit the website regularly.
8. Take advantage of Feedburner. If you want to manage RSS easily, you should register a Feedburner account. This service is completely free and has many useful features, such as counting subscriber information, various customization options, and more. Feedburner also allows the blog output content to be well compatible with most browsers and RSS readers, so that subscribers will not be lost due to technical reasons.
9. Provide email subscription. Many netizens do not yet use RSS, so providing email subscriptions is very necessary. Fortunately, it is easy to achieve using Feedburner. Just activate the "Publicize" feature in Feedburner, paste and copy the subscription link to the website.
10. Create an email newsletter. By further optimizing email subscriptions, you can create an email newsletter, which can effectively control the content pushed to subscribers' mailboxes. For example, define an automatic push rule to send specific content to subscribers' mailboxes at a specific time. You need an email marketing software to achieve this function, such as Aweber. (Tristan: This is a paid solution)
Content is king
11. Break the first-hand news. If your website is the first news source to break the news, there will be many links to websites that talk about it, and the traffic will naturally increase.
12. Write a controversial article. If you can successfully write a controversial article, people will naturally link to your article when arguing, whether they agree with your point of view or, in most cases, disagree. The result, of course, is that traffic can be greatly increased.
13. Write a “Top 10” list. People who surf the Internet like the "Top Ten XX" list, which is concise and easy to understand and contains effective information. (For example, the top ten xx resources, the top ten tips, etc.)
14. Write a “Top 100” list. If the "Top 10" list can bring a lot of traffic, the "Top 100" list is definitely more useful. This article is an example. Because this kind of article can aggregate and summarize something valuable, people will naturally mark this article in their bookmarks and share it.
15. Write a "general tutorial" for doing something. People enjoy learning new things, especially techniques that solve their problems. Make sure your tutorials are as thorough as possible and visitors will flock to you.
16. Post an interview. If the interviewee has a blog or website, the effect will be better. The other party will give a link to the interview article, and his visitors will click over.
17. Use holidays or regular events as topics. Write some content related to festivals or regularly held events, and your traffic will also increase significantly. For example, about Christmas, elections, Olympics, World Cup and other festivals and events.
Website optimization
51. Customize your 404 error page. Whether you like it or not, there are always visitors who are taken to a 404 error page on your website. Perhaps the URL address was misspelled, perhaps it was linked to a page that does not exist on the website, or for other reasons. If you use the default 404 page, visitors will immediately go to other websites. But if you optimize the 404 page and add useful links, you may be able to guide them to other pages of the website, which can be regarded as increasing traffic.
52. Web pages are linked to each other. This method increases visits in two ways. First, it is more convenient for visitors to view the website and increases the number of visits to each page. At the same time, it can also improve website search rankings because link juice will be more widely distributed to the entire website.
53. Highlight your most popular content. When people visit a website they want to know which one is the most popular. Highlight your most popular content and recommend it to your readers to get more page views from each visitor. The easiest way to do this is to add “Popular Articles” to your sidebar.
54. Test the website in different browsers. If a website doesn't display properly in a visitor's browser, they won't hesitate to abandon their visit. That’s why it’s important to make sure your website displays properly in most browsers. The online service Browsershots.org can help you check it, and it's completely free.
55. Speed up your website. Many studies have confirmed that most Internet users can only tolerate a few seconds of loading time for a web page. If it is delayed, most people will immediately move to other websites. What's more important is that search engines are now beginning to use loading speed as a factor that affects rankings. The faster the loading, the higher the ranking. The first step to improve the speed is to reduce unnecessary elements on the web page and reduce the size of the images. Using the Firebug extension for Firefox can provide more detailed analysis of loading speed.
56. Provide cache page service. An effective way to reduce load times is to serve cached pages. At the same time, it can also reduce the load on the web server and make the website respond faster. WordPress users can use the WP Super Cache plugin to achieve this.
57. Find a good hosting plan. No matter how well you optimize your website, if your hosting plan is mediocre to begin with, pages will still be slow to load. So stay away from free or cheap hosting. Investing $10 per month in quality hosting is a must.
search engine optimization
58. Create original content. If you want to get traffic from search engines, you should focus all your time on one thing and work hard to add original content. This is what Google and the company value most. The more original content and the more frequent updates, the better the effect.
59. Build backlinks. The second most important thing you can do to improve your search rankings and gain organic traffic is to build backlinks. You need as many websites to link to your website as possible. The higher the authority and relevance of the link, the better the effect. For example, if you have a technology blog, getting links from TechCrunch or other authoritative technology blogs will do wonders for SEO.
60. Conduct keyword research. Search engines work around keywords and understand what keywords people are using so they can tailor their content to match. For example, the search volume for the keyword “funny pictures” is 15 times higher than that for “funny images,” so using “funny pictures” in the title is more helpful. Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to check the search volume of any keyword.
61. Optimize web page titles. The title of a web page refers to the title part of the web page, located between the tags <title></title> at the head of the HTML code. It appears in the title bar at the top of the browser when accessing the web page. This is a very important on-page SEO factor. You should make sure that each page of the website has a unique page title, and the keywords should appear in it. WordPress users can install the All in One SEO Pack plugin to automatically achieve this.
62. Create an HTML sitemap. An HTML sitemap is a web page that links to all other pages (and preferably is also linked to by all other web pages). HTML sitemaps help search engines crawl and index websites and improve search rankings.
63. Use pictures. Most webmasters forget that Google has a very popular "image search," which means that using images on your web pages can also increase traffic from search engines. Make sure to optimize your image names with relevant keywords, and remember to always use the ALT and TITLE attributes on your images. Thousands of copyright-free images can be found on the website sxc.hu.
64. Translate website content. Depending on the theme of the website, translating the website into other language pages may gain doubled traffic in search engines. Achieving this goal also requires a plug-in that enables search engines to index the translated web pages. WordPress users can use this Global Translator.
mobile device
65. Create a mobile-friendly version of your website. As more and more people use mobile devices to access websites, it will be important to have a mobile version that can adapt to these new platforms. If you use WordPress, you can add a WPTouch plug-in to automatically generate a mobile version of the website.
66. Create an iPhone app for the website. The iPhone is considered the most popular smartphone and despite the controversy, most of its users rely heavily on its apps to manage their content. If you can create an iPhone application to display website content, you will not only gain new readers, but also make existing readers more convenient to read on iPhone. There is an open source project that can help you create one for free.
67. Create an Android app for the website. Google's mobile operating system, Android, is rapidly expanding into smartphones, so an app should be created for it as well. But this requires some programming knowledge.
online forum
68. Join online groups and put a website link in your signature. No matter what the topic of your website is, you can always find many relevant forums to join. Most will allow you to put a link in the signature file, which can also be used to send visitors to your website. If you need to find online forums, you can use Big-Boards.com, which has thousands of forums organized into categories in its database.
69. Link to your article in the post. In addition to putting a link in your signature, you can also insert a link to your article when posting. For example, if you write an article that is very useful to other forum members, you can make a post to let them know and ask for feedback. But you have to make sure the article is relevant, otherwise you will be labeled as a spammer.
70. Join the Craigslist forum. When you browse Craigslist (Tristan: the most popular classified ads site on the Internet), you will find that every city has a "Forum" section. You can post articles there and add links to your website, as long as they are relevant to the discussion.
71. Consider adding a forum to your website. Once the website reaches a critical user level (such as 5,000 unique visitors per day or more), you can consider adding a forum to the website. This will give visitors a platform to ask questions and share content, while also increasing traffic. You can use phpBB, a reliable and free forum software.
Content aggregation
72. Create “lenses” on Squidoo. Each "lens" on Squidoo is an overview page about a certain topic. Creating lenses is free, you can put any content into them, and remember to include your website link.
73. Create "hub" on HubPages. A website very similar to Squidoo is called "HubPages". You can create "hubs" about specific topics and of course put website links in them. However, you need to read the website guidelines to ensure that your hubs can be published.
74. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers. Take some time to look at the questions on Yahoo Answers and answer them whenever they are relevant to the topic of your site. You can provide a link to a website as a reference in your answer, or directly provide a link to a specific article on your website that answers the question.
75. Answer questions on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Answers is another Q&A platform where you can answer other users' questions and provide a link to a website or article. Remember to keep the topic relevant and provide engaging business answers around the career.
traditional method
76. Submit your website to web directories. The traffic you can get with this method depends on the quality of the web directories that include your site. But if you can submit it to hundreds of directories, you can also get considerable traffic. Here is a list of hundreds of web directories sorted by PR.
77. Submit your blog to blog directories. If you have a blog, you can also submit it to blog directories (directories that only include blogs). You can start with the 50 directories listed in this article.
78. Submit content to article directories. Marketing through articles is a very common and effective way to increase traffic. All that is required is to submit the article to an article directory. Almost all article directory websites allow you to insert a link to your website, which can increase traffic. This list lists the 50 most popular article directory websites.
79.Exchange links. The practice of exchanging links has been around since the advent of the Internet, and it has endured because it is so useful. You should be careful to only exchange links with sites that have original content and are useful to your visitors (otherwise you may be penalized by Google).
80. Leverage ad exchanges. Another similar approach is to use ad exchanges. You use unused ad space to promote your partner's website, and they do the same. Advertisements can be anything from banner ads to promotional messages in email newsletters.
81. Distribute press releases. Writing a press release and distributing it can also bring in some traffic, especially if it's about new news in your field. You can either pay a company like PRWeb to do it for you, or you can submit press releases manually (here are 50 websites to submit them to)
82. Add website links to your email signature. Email is still the most widely used method of communication, so you can use it to make your contacts aware of your website.
Payment method
83. Google AdWords. PPC (Pay-per-click, pay-per-click) advertising form is the most effective way to buy traffic for the website, and Google AdWords is the largest online platform on the Internet. It's free to create an account, and then you have to bid on the keywords you need. Depending on the niche you identify, it may be possible to buy clicks at a very low price.
84. Facebook ads. The best advertising platform that replaces Google AdWords is Facebook. You can pay per click or per 1,000 impressions, and you can also set specific target audiences as advertising objects to ensure that visitors will be interested in your content.
85. StumbleUpon advertising. If your website performs well on social media, you might want to try StumbleUpon ads. Your website (or a specific page) will be displayed to StumbleUpon users at a price of $0.05 per impression. If many users actively vote for the content you provide, you can also get some free traffic.
86.Sponsored links on Reddit. Another social bookmarking site where ads can be purchased is Reddit. The sponsored link you create will appear as featured content on the homepage, and Reddit users will be able to vote for it to go up or down.
87. Buy banner ads directly. Virtually all webmasters are willing to sell banner ads. If you can find a website that is very relevant to your own website, you can contact the webmaster directly to inquire about the price of banner ads. The ROI can be high because visitors are likely to stay on your site and become loyal readers.
88. Purchase banner ads from third-party advertising platforms. There are advertising platforms online that can help you purchase banner ads by paying a monthly fee. BuySellAds.com is an advertising platform with many websites that can be placed.
89. Purchase paid reviews. Sometimes paid comments are very useful to drive traffic because your website will be displayed directly in the article (that is, the link will be displayed directly in front of readers of other websites). To buy paid reviews, you can contact the webmaster directly or go through a professional website like SponsoredReviews.com (make sure the sponsored link has the nofollow attribute, otherwise you may be penalized by Google).
Offline promotion methods
90. Tell your friends and family about your website. These people will definitely be interested in your website and click on it, and if the content is updated frequently, they are likely to continue to check it out.
91. Tell your colleagues about your website. This is another group of people who will be interested in your website and visit it regularly. It will be better if your website is related to your work.
92. Add your website address to your business card. If you frequently give people business cards, consider putting a link to your website. Business partners might be interested after all.
93. Print the URL on a T-shirt. It’s easy and cheap to buy custom T-shirts these days, and wearing a T-shirt with your website printed on it will be a great way to spread the word.
94. Make stickers with your website address printed on them and put them around. If you want to use a guerrilla promotion method, you can make some stickers with URLs and put them around. You can stick it on cars, windows, and computers.
95. Advertise in the local newspaper. Depending on your website's niche, advertising in local newspapers can be a good investment. For example, if you have a blog about local news events, advertising in the local newspaper will bring you some new readers.
unconventional methods
96. Think of a creative April Fools’ Day prank. The Internet is also very active on April 1st, and many companies and webmasters will come up with interesting pranks. If you can also come up with a creative prank, others may give you a link, which will bring traffic. For inspiration, check out TechCrunch's roundup of the creative pranks of 2010.
97. Set the home page of any computer you use to be your website. If you can keep going, it will bring a lot of traffic. For example, as long as you use a certain computer in school, work, library, etc., set its homepage as your website.
98. Navigate to your website in the Computer Store. This method can bring a lot of traffic, and it's definitely an interesting method. Whenever you walk into a store with computers on display, fire up a browser and open your page so people walking by will see it.
99. Put your website on a for-sale list. Even if you don’t plan to sell your website, you can still put it up and give it a try. Interested buyers will visit your website, and that's how you get traffic. If you can put it on some large trading websites, such as Flippa.com, you may get thousands of visitors (and maybe a good offer!).
100. Pretend to be hacked. Every time a website or blog is hacked, it causes quite an uproar in the community of bloggers and webmasters. If you can pretend to be hacked (by putting a strange message on your homepage), you'll get a lot of backlinks and a traffic boost. However, people may get angry if they find out it's a prank