inspiredbywordpress

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Wordpress Blog

Image by Viernest

We all want to drive more traffic to our Wordpress Blogs.  In fact, the want for traffic doesn’t stop with Wordpress.  However you manage your website, your want traffic.  You don’t even have to be using a CMS.

So, as always the question is how can you get more traffic?  Now, getting traffic is one thing, but the real question is how you can get appropriate traffic.  If I had the choice between 20, 000 visitors that couldn’t give a damn about my content and one one visitor who would be interested in the content I would go with the single visitor anytime.  Why?  The single visitor would come back, and participate in discussion.  The 20, 000 would leave after a few seconds and never come back.

That is the difference between loyal visitors and other visitors.

Getting The Traffic

Getting traffic is all about links.  The more links back to your website you have the more likely one is to be seen by someone who will care.  The trick is to put them in the right place.  For example, posting links to this website on a cooking website might get me a few visitors, but surely posting a link to this site on a website that many Wordpress users use would be more appropriate.  Like Wordpress.org, for example.

If the cooking site got me more loyal visitors, I’d be shocked.

At the end of the day, we want people who care about our content, and those people tend to search for it.  Using search engines like Google, or Yahoo. But, this then brings a new question.  How to work up the ranks.  How do I get on the front page of result on a search engine.  That’s not so easy.

So, we want to up our ranks on the big Search Engines now.  That also comes back to links (you spotted the pattern yet?).  The more links back to your site you get, the more popular a Search Engine thinks your content is, and so it moves your content up the ranks, and eventually into the front page.  That the proper way of doing it anyway.

The other way is to advertise on a Search Engine.  That will put you on every page.  But it will cost.

Search Engine Optimisation also comes into play when people begin to search for content online.  But, links is just a small bit of it.  At the end of the day a Search Engine is just trying to serve to most relevant content to a customer (the person who searches) and allow them to proceed to view it.  SEO, at it’s roots is all about links and keywords.  And the more relevant keywords you have on your website, the better.  For example, in this case I need traffic who are interested in Wordpress, and so I use the word Wordpress a lot.

Some help to start you off

Here are some suggestions to help you get going with your own SEO project.

• Post links on forums
• Leave comment on other related Blogs, but don’t forget to fill out the URL field
• Advertise strategically
• Monitor the results (I would suggest a service like Google Analytics (I reviewed a Wordpress plugin to work with it a while ago)
• Use the All In One SEO plugin if you use Wordpress
• Use a Sitemap to help search engine robots (Wordpress plugin review)

Got any additional tips?  How do you promote and drive traffic to your website?