If you’re anything like me and you’ve just started to work on your first website you may already be feeling frustrated. A few months ago I decided to make an extreme sports magazine style website on a WordPress platform and although when I started out, I liked my site, the only traffic that I used to get were from friends and family members who quite generously pretended to have an interest in what I was creating. Whilst these were loyal and wanted me to do well, few of them had any interest in my subject. I knew that if I wanted to have a successful website that I would have to do a lot more in order to increase traffic.

Appealing Visual Cues

I’m sure that if you think about it, some of the sites that you visit on a regular basis are visually stunning or make for a fantastic user experience. I realised quite early on that what I like isn’t what every extreme sports fan likes and in order for my website to retain the few unique visitors that it received, I would have to make the whole experience much more user friendly and visually appealing.

It is vital to know your market and design your site visually in a way that appeals to your demographic. Extreme sports fans for example are generally in the age range of 15 – 40. There is a pretty equal mix of both men and women and in general they don’t just want to read a block of text. To appeal to a larger market I needed to add more photos to my articles and split the text up into much more manageable sections.

Whilst this didn’t exactly increase my traffic, it did encourage the extreme sports fans who visited my site to browse it for longer and sometimes even subscribe to it for instant notifications of new posts.

SEO Techniques

As well as appealing to your demographic visually, you also need to make your site appealing to the search engines. By implementing SEO techniques you can increase your page rank which can greatly increase the number of visitors your site receives on a daily basis. Below are some of the SEO techniques that I have implemented.

• Content – Posting new content on a regular basis is not only good in the eyes of the search engines but it keeps your readers happy too. Make sure your content is over a certain number of words (usually around 350) so that the search engines can actually distinguish what your page is about. Of course, duplicate content is a huge no no!
• Visit similar blogs and either post a meaningful comment with a link back to your site or ask if you can create a guest blog for them which includes a link to your site.
• Use headings and formatting correctly.
• Learn about keyword density and keyword stuffing. Work out the keywords or phrases that you would like your website to rank for and include them in the text as naturally as possible. Do not keyword stuff unless you want your site to be delisted from the search engines.
• Make your website easy to navigate.
• Include your keyword in all headings and meta tags where possible.

In the last two months since I started my SEO campaign, the number of visitors who have found my site through the search engines has gone from virtually no-one to around 100 people per day. There is still a lot for me to do of course, but I just wanted to show you that if I can increase my traffic by implementing just a few techniques so can you.

Not everyone has the time it takes to implement SEO techniques and if you are one of these people you may want to look into hiring an SEO reseller like Zeno SEO. They know what they are doing and will implement the techniques described above and more to make your website more successful.