Website traffic is something that most marketers focus on. To a reasonable extent, it’s a matter of quality over quantity but you still need some traffic to your site otherwise it’s not worth anything to you.
1. Make it search engine friendly
Google and the other search engines are one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website.
They specialise in matching up the clues that users give them by the words they type with the pages that (at least according to the computer algorithm) are the best match for those words.
Make sure that your website is search engine friendly – there are SEO plugins for WordPress that make this relatively easy – and make sure that the content you put up on your site answers potential things people will type in.
2. Target long tail phrases
The chance of your site showing up near the top of the results for any short keyword phrase are about the same as you winning the lottery. Close to zero.
Long tail keyword phrases – usually four words and more – are much easier to target and are also much more likely to meet the specific requirements of searchers.
One of the ways I regularly find these phrases is with the suggestions that Google shows whenever you start typing a word or two. These phrases are the most up to date source of keyword information on the internet – they’re as close to real time as you’re likely to get – and are often easy to rank for as they don’t often show in the keyword planning tool.
3. Get relevant links from other sites
The days of getting ranked just because you had thousands of spammy links are long gone.
Quality counts here just as much as it does for the actual content on your site.
Relevant links could be from an industry directory or, more commonly, somewhere relevant in an article on another site.
Some sites encourage you to submit “guest posts” which can include a link back to your website. Others are more circumspect and you have to build up a relationship with the website owner before they’ll publish your guest post.
Google don’t like paid-for guest posts so be careful with this method but so long as what you do is ethical you’ll be fine.
4. Help other people in forums, etc
Forums have been around the internet for as long as I can remember and before the internet came into existence they were known as bulletin boards.
Much like the real forums in Roman days, these are places where people gather to meet.
They’re more focused than sites like Facebook and you will often find people asking questions and hoping that someone knowledgeable can help them.
If you’re one of the helpful people on one or two chosen forums then you’ll build up trust from the other forum users and your signature or profile link will start to attract visitors from the forum onto your site.
If you’d like to know more, check out this video about promoting your website for free.
And check out this page about getting 5 times more backlinks to from your website content.