What Tools Do I Need to Drive Traffic to My Website?
In contrast to website design, traffic generation is more science than art. The type of tools that you need to support your traffic generation efforts revolve around the following 3 key strategies:
1- Priming search-engine algorithms to begin favoring your webpages
Search engines are the gatekeepers between your content and your visitors, and these gatekeepers are not humans with judgement, they're machines ruled by logic and devoid of emotion.
You could write the most compelling article for your target audience, but nobody will ever see it if search engines bury it on page 7. How to prevent this from happening? By writing for two distinct audiences: your visitors and search engine algorithms.
By using the right tools and harvesting user data from search engines, you can prime them to begin favoring your content and ranking it high in the search results.
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2- Adding a web of well-placed contextual internal links in your posts
Search engines consider internal linking to be an important page ranking signal.
In fact, they don't like it when you have a large number of “orphan” posts (i.e. posts that are not interlinked with any other posts). Search engines do like it, however, when you link to other relevant posts on your site because this creates a better experience for their users.
For example, if you’re writing about how to properly light an indoor photograph in one of your posts and you have another post where you rate the best lighting equipment available for different budgets, it makes sense that you create an internal link between those two articles.
Now, as you grow your blog, you’ll realize that you'll need to constantly go back to older posts to link them to newer ones. Fortunately, there are some nifty tools out there that automate a lot of this manual process so that instead of spending hours doing this work, you only need to spend a few minutes.
3- Making sure your website can be loaded from anywhere around the world at the fastest possible speed
The final traffic generation strategy is to ensure that your website can be served to visitors from around the world at the highest possible speed.
Search engines penalize slow-loading websites, because they know that when pages take too long to load, visitors will become impatient after a few seconds of inactivity and move on. Speed is a very important ranking signal for search engine algorithms.
In order to ensure your website can be loaded quickly from anywhere in the world, you'll need to sign up with a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, which will pre-load your site on local servers in data centers distributed around the world to make sure that you're not penalized for slow loading times.
3 Sets of Tools that Will Help Take Your Traffic to the Next Level
In line with the above traffic building strategies, the following tools will help you boost traffic to your website (pro tip: if you want to maximize your online income, you'll need to use all three):
Looking for an experienced hand to help you drive traffic to your site? Check our consulting page.