Best Free Ways to Get More Views Followers and Traffic to your Site

Are you looking to get more views, followers or traffic to your site? Your not alone. Millions of small business owners, content publishers and marketers all have the same thing in mind when it comes to increasing the traffic to their website. Doing it the right way can lead to not only higher visibility in search engines, but more followers that will recommend your content to others.

Here are some of the more popular ways to generate more traffic and visitors to your site. First let’s start with blogging and article marketing.

Publish a great deal of quality content. This cannot be overstated. Write, or have others write for you, quality content of at least 600 words or more. Take the perspective of  becoming the ultimate resource on each subject you write about. Try and include images as much as possible. Give your Pinterest fans a good photo to pin and your Instagram followers a reason to double-tap. Great content will make your visitors want to share it with others. If you want your post to be indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, be sure to set your blog or other site privacy settings accordingly.

Post Content on LinkedIn. Unknown to many, LinkedIn is much more than simply a means of finding another job, but a valuable publishing platform. For this reason, you should be posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Just this action alone can help boost traffic to your website, as well as increase your profile within your industry. Obviously, the bigger your following, the more effective it will be.

Take Advantage of social media. A wonderful cost-effective way to get your content in front of a targeted audience is using social media. Tell people in your social networks about your new posts. Some features can even make it easy; for example, WordPress.com’s Publicize feature will automatically tell your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and others the moment you publish a new post. Sure, you can manually share content, but time is money, so make it easy on yourself.

Leverage the followers of others.  Know websites that get generate a great deal of traffic? Ask if your can submit content to them, or consider inviting them to post on your site as well. Their existing communities will follow them to your site to read their post, and if you’ve got great content they find interesting, they might stick around!

Commenting on other blogs. This can be a great vehicle to generate visitors, but be careful not to spam. Begin by finding other bloggers who share your interests. Then, subscribe to their blog and get to know them a bit. When you read a post that moves you in some way, leave a comment, but post If, and only if, you have something valuable to contribute. This will help you build credibility, relationships and can position you as an authority on certain issues. In fact, you might also want to link to other blogs, since blogging is all about engaging with others and interacting in online discussions. When you link to a blog post, the blogger will likely find your blog through their stats, and might even subscribe to your site and leave a comment.

Always use appropriate tags. Attach appropriate categories and tags to your posts so people can find them; however, do not use too many tags. In some blogs, the more tags you post, the less likely your post will be featured. Ten is probably more than enough to cover your subject well.

Include engagement buttons on your website. Make it obvious for your visitors to share your content. Don’t assume because the content is good that they will read on. Ever notice the button options at the top of Facebook? Book, contact, learn more, shop, download, join etc. Adding these buttons on the top of your page can get more fans and followers, as well as prompt visitors to connect with you. Also, be sure to include share buttons strategically around your content. This will motivate your visitors to share it on their preferred networks. 

If you don't ask, you won’t receive. While your website visitors may share your content or website without your asking, a great deal more would if you simply asked. There are many ways to do this: pop-ups, share bars, customized greetings, follow up emails, etc. Many times, people will only view your site 5-6 seconds before deciding whether to move on; therefore, prompt them as soon as they hit your website to do something.

Make sure your site is responsive. Don’t know what it means? Keep in mind that now more than ever, people are using mobile devices to access the web.If you are making it difficult for them to view and operate your website, they will leave. Make sure that your website is responsive, accessible and comfortably viewable across a range of devices, including smaller smartphones.

No one likes slow sites. The attention span of the average visitor to your site is probably not more than about 5 - 6 seconds. If your website has not loaded by then, you will lose them. Even worse, your bounce rate will be sky high. Make sure that your pages are as technically optimized as possible, including image file sizes, page structure and the functionality of third-party plugins. Quite frankly, the faster your site loads, the better. There are a number of free online tools that can tell you the page load speed of your pages.

Website settings. Look into making the most of your website images with alt text. Also, a few more things: create internal links to new content, include meta descriptions, and be sure to optimizing pages to make it easy for search engines to crawl your website.

Analytics and Tracking software. Though this is listed at the end, this is probably the most important. Tracking and optimizing your content for search engines is critical towards your success and efficiency.. While there are quite a few to choose from, Google analytics is free and is an excellent tool. It is free, automatically collects data, allows you to create custom reports, easily integrates into other tools and platforms, allows you to know where and why people are bouncing off your website, and lets you objectively determine where you are generating the most clients.

In summary, success online is not so different that success offline. You need to learn what to do before just doing it. Don’t be the fool that says, “there are so many people out in the world wide web, that all I need to do is post something and they will come running.” Hopefully this will help you begin your path to online success.