How To Increase Web Traffic: 7 Reasons For Low Visitor Counts

Perhaps you’re hoping to earn a little money from blogging. You’ve already picked a web host for your needs, out of a list of cheap web hosting services. You’ve got your blog up and running and now you’re looking for ways to improve your sluggish web traffic which needs a big kick.

This topic has been covered countless of times on the net but I’d like to approach it from the angle of someone who is learning the process. So as I sat through filtering and sifting through articles on online marketing, all I can tell you is what worked for me.

Where’s My Web Traffic? Reasons For Low Visitor Counts

There are techniques available that should help you gain traction fairly and honestly, albeit gradually. Let’s start by understanding why your traffic may be lousy (interestingly, “lousy” is a relative term as one’s poor showing may be manna to somebody else, but what I mean is that your traffic is stagnant):

You’re not SEO optimized. Your site is too slow. You don’t have enough quality links pointing to you. You’re not doing enough marketing nor are you making yourself known to your target audience. You’re not making your site available nor readable to search engine crawlers. You are a victim of Google Panda (the latest Google search algorithm update that evaluates site quality). Your site or pages have incurred search engine penalties.

One or more of these issues may have affected your site, particularly if you’re a new publisher. Perhaps your site could use a bit more work. Or, it’s possible that you may have tripped Google and/or Bing guidelines. I’ve actually learned a few things from my own experiences and from the recommendations of experts and gurus of this well worn subject. Allow me to elaborate on these points:

You’re not SEO optimized.

Apply SEO techniques to your site. You need to find the right keywords and add them to your HTML TITLE, META Keywords, META Description and Alt Tags. You may want to use SEO tools like a keyword selector tool to help you with keyword analysis, but take care that you don’t abuse the use of keywords. Your site is too slow.

Users may turn away from your site if it takes too long to load, so improve its performance by watching where you put the javascript web service widgets you may have on your site or blog. They take some time to render so place them at a point in your page where they can be rendered after everything else as much as possible. Always add height and width parameters to images you use in your posts so that the browser can lay out the page without waiting for the image. Also reduce the images’ clarity to 40% or less to make their footprint smaller, which you can do with an image editor. And to see how awesome a job you’ve done with page optimization, run your pages through a Web Page Optimizer and see how you stack up! You don’t have enough quality links pointing to you.

Quality links are desirable because these are supposedly what the search engines are using to “rank” your site. Link directories are pretty passe nowadays, so pursue a natural link building process. Perhaps you can drop your online calling card at somebody else’s site by leaving them insightful and useful comments and pointers to your homepage. In the beginning, I tried getting my site into free directories. I even explored BlogExplosion and BlogMad as traffic generating (or traffic trading) sites but all these methods are now obsolete. The best way to build links is to build a reputation first. By networking naturally with others, you’ll most likely receive solid, high quality links without having to be too persuasive. You’re not doing enough marketing nor are you making yourself known to your target audience.

Did anyone tell you that you need to write from 3 to 5 blog posts a week of good, substantive content? Well, they’re not kidding (and I initially thought they were)! And if you’re doing news, you need to up that number due to time sensitivity. Then you need to make your posts visible to social bookmarking or social networking communities like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Add social networking icons to your site to make it easy for readers to share your content with others. Your site has technical problems.

The bots and spiders can choke on your site if it has HTML errors. Use an HTML Validator religiously if you can. Also, make your content available through feeds, but make sure that you are careful about syndication. Be very careful as the web has evolved to frown upon reckless syndication techniques. Too much content duplication or the wrong type of syndication can actually get your site in trouble with the main search engines. Your pages are nowhere to be found but are indexed.

Your pages can rank poorly because of low quality content. These days, Google has raised its standards for detecting which sites should be deserving of traffic. Make sure you provide unique, useful and up to date content that will attract users and readers. Google measures user engagement and looks upon the user metrics behind its SERPs (search engine results) to figure out which sites to present to users. Your site may have incurred search engine penalties.

If you’ve practiced black hat or poor SEO strategies, your site (or its pages) may have triggered penalties. Correct your missteps and either file for a reconsideration request with the search engine that hit you with bad marks, or you can just wait for the penalties to expire (which they do over time). If you continue to break any guidelines, don’t expect to see improvements in traffic.

Check out Copyblogger.com, Searchengineland.com or Problogger.net for additional web traffic building resources.

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