How to increase website visitors, is the question all new website owners ask. Even website owners who have had a site built but done no marketing to increase visibility on the internet yet.

There is a very large list of ways to increase your website traffic. Some are very effective others not so much alone, but as part of an overall strategy can be effective.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The most important in order to get long term sustainable results has to be search engine optimization. This has various areas such as on-page, off-page, technical optimization and is a long process for good results, but they are much longer lasting results compared to other methods of marketing.

On-page Optimization

A few Examples:

• Ensuring the use of alt attribute in your image tags
• Optimizing header text and content to contain target keywords and synonyms.
• Metadata optimization (Title and Descriptions)

Off-page Optimization

A few examples:

• Social media marketing
• Guest blogging
• Linked and unlinked brand mentions
• Review Campaigns

Technical SEO

A few examples:

• Website Speed Optimization
• Use of HTTPS
• SEO friendly URL’s

This is far from a comprehensive list for SEO methods, but gives you some idea on how much can be done to improve organic results within search engines which leads to an increase in website visitors.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM also commonly known as Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, these have very quick results at increasing website visitors and gets you reach that can’t be attained through SEO alone.

There are various platforms PPC campaigns can be run on: Google Adwords, Bing and Yahoo Advertising, Facebook, Linkedin. Depending on your services/products each has their advantages.

All these are sure to increase website visitors, but the downside being it can get quite expensive, even when you have well optimized campaigns. The other problem is when/if you stop, that’s it. Other than the built up brand awareness and customer base you have no more website visitors.

Social Marketing

Using social marketing to interact with your current customer base and followers can help grow your website traffic from shares and likes to gain reach to new people.

This sometimes can fall into both SEM and SEO. As social signals do have an impact on SEO. Then to get the best from social marketing it is does require a pay per click budget to advertise. However, it is a topic deserving of its own explanation and to be separated from both SEO and SEM.

Email Marketing

Although the old spam methods of mailing out to huge lists of email addresses without their previous consent have gone thankfully. Email marketing can still work well.

We can still use email marketing to make the most out of customers we have, and those signed up to any account/newsletter/special offers mailing lists.

Offline Marketing

Of course then you have offline marketing methods which when used correctly can have a big impact on your efforts to increase website visitors. Obviously you would need to display or mention your website in the advert, have an easy to remember URL, or strong brand search term position in search engines

Some Examples:

• TV Adverts
• Radio Adverts
• Billboards
• Flyer/Mail Marketing