4 Basics to Gain Permanent Traffic to Your Website

‘If you build it, they will come’ is an adage that just doesn’t apply to websites… no matter how hard we wish it did. While it’s easy to build your own website, there’s no guarantee of success. Even providing the best content on a beautifully-designed theme gives no guarantee of traffic, leaving many webmasters left scratching their heads about just how to draw visitors in. Luckily, there are multiple ways to achieve this.

Traditional Marketing

Old school advertising is still relevant, and a well-crafted advertisement can be a powerful force to drive traffic to your site. Great ideas include billboards, car wraps, event appearances, and television ads. But you can also take that advertising online, by way of YouTube advertisements, or banner ads on websites which offer services parallel to yours, and capitalizes on a similar targeted audience. Budgets for traditional marketing really run the gamut, so you can rest assured that you can find something in your price range.

Social Media Promotion

Social media promotion is another great way to gain traffic. This includes posting regularly to social media, utilizing paid ads on social media, and employing social influencers to promote your website. Social media promotion can be free or paid, with paid options often reaching broader audiences. An important thing to consider when engaging in social media is which social platform to use! Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are all just common examples, each of which offer different promotional formats. Use the networks which your target demographic is likely to be at, and ensure that you integrate social media throughout your website. Many WordPress plugins allow you to automatically cross-post new pages or posts to any linked social media accounts, a free way of promoting your website on social media platforms.

Never Stop Building Your Website

If built correctly, utilizing WordPress SEO functions and plugins, your website should already be SEO optimized: meaning it is more likely to rank for organic searches through Google and other search engines for the topic your website is about. But a website which is static (unchanging) will quickly lose any ranks it gains at first, so the best way to continually build good SEO (and therefore more traffic through organic searches) is to continually build pages, either by adding informational articles or engaging blog posts regarding your website’s topic. Over time, the more articles you build which are of quality (over 300 words and all original content), you will begin seeing an increase in web traffic simply because you have provided more landing pages for organic searchers to fall onto. Creating interesting, engaging titles for posts or pages is a must, and ensuring that you try to create at least one new post or page a day will ensure steady growth over time.

Build Authority

Having other websites in your industry linking to your website helps to build the authority of your own website: authority being, in this case, how pertinent and authoritative search engines believe your website to be on the subject it is about. More authority generally means a higher placement on search engine results, which in turn translates to a higher visitor count… and better quality visitors, who linger longer on pages and dig more deeply into a website. Often, one can build authority by guest-blogging on related websites, and linking to your own website in the author description, or linking your website into prominent, trustworthy informational directories.

The Bottom Line

There are many ways to gain traffic to a website; but if your website doesn’t provide great content, you won’t keep your visitors. Always be sure to provide great and original to content, and not only will the visitors you get become ‘sticky’, and more likely to return, but search engines will begin recognizing the quality of your content and help to promote your website to searchers, helping to gain traffic to your website at little to no cost.