Just like a tailored suit won’t make people around you to like you more straight away, new shiny website won’t immediately get you attention and popularity. That’s a fact, sad but true. It’s a good start, though! Gaining notoriety, increasing page views number and reducing the bounce rate (a percent of users who dropped out within the first few seconds) takes time and effort.
You have two options here: you will either pay someone to do it for you or you will get your hands dirty. The truth to be told is that the majority of the groundwork is not a rocket science at all! It means that you can contribute significantly to the overall outcome and improve your website search engine ranking all by yourself – as long as you are comfortable with doing little writing and editing.
Let me share few of the most reliable and applicable ways to increase the user traffic and boost page views on your website:
Build quality inbound links
One of the best ways to improve your website’s ranking almost instantaneously is to have a link pointing to it from another – already popular website. This is how people get their page views increased from 20 visits per day to 2000 and more. TIP: If by any chance your business qualifies to publish itself on any educational or governmental organisation with domain .edu or .gov you are lucky! These two domains are known for being the most trusted as not every business can claim it due special regulations.
Start guest publishing
Having an article or a blog post published for free or a commission somewhere where it can be easily exposed to a relevant audience is a gold mine of click-throughs. There are plenty of popular portals for any industry that welcomes other people to write for them. In exchange for contribution, they usually offer to enclose contact details and company’s profile somewhere. This is not only a good to get more page views but also to spread a word about you and your service or product.
Get meta tags right
If you haven’t done it already, do it straight away after you finish reading this article. Each page of your website should contain a title and description. These meta data are visible for search engines and help internet users to determine whether your website might contain relevant information that they are after or not. This is probably a little more technical if you do not have a CMS (editing system) implemented on your website so in that case contact your administrator or give me a shout.
Internal crosslinking
To keep users engaged, to reveal more potentially relevant information to them, it’s a good idea to guide them through your website by always providing links embedded in texts within your pages. This means that any text that contains valuable and searchable keywords should be marked as an ANCHOR to another page or place WITHIN your website. Thanks to that, a search engine crawlers find it easier to assess the value and relevancy of your website or other people.
Improve your url
URL names of your pages could also be improved by adding more keywords to it. Let’s say you are IT specialist for fixing MAC devices in London. By rewriting the URL of your about page from let’s say “/about me” to for example”/about-us-London-mac-repairs”, you will get more exposure in search engines. Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don’t need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don’t worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there’s probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. The more succinct – the better.
Descriptive image names and alternative tags
Very similar to the entry above: name your images descriptively and in plain English! It’s really easy to blast through hundreds of product shots and keep the default file name your camera gives them. When it comes to SEO, it’s important to use acceptable keywords to help your webpage rank on search engines. Creating descriptive, keyword-rich file names is absolutely crucial for image optimization. Search engines not only crawl the text on your webpage, but they also search for keywords within your image file names.
Alt tags are a text alternative to images when a browser can’t properly render them. Even when the image is rendered, if you hover over it with your mouse pointer, you can see the alt tag text created for that image (depending on your browser settings). By adding appropriate alt tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images. As a matter of fact, using alt tags is probably the best way for your ecommerce products to show up in Google image and web search.
Conclusion
As you can see, most of the important upgrades can be achieved fairly easily. If you have more questions about getting more people visiting your websites, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Every website is slightly different, but they are all just text in the end of the day – that has to be legible and accessible.
