Tips to Drive More Traffic to Your WordPress Website

If you’re anything like me, you’re on a constant journey to drive more traffic to your site. The more traffic your site gets, the more money you make and the closer you are that coveted Four Hour Workweek lifestyle.

 

But getting traffic aint easy. The people are out there, but finding them and subsequently getting them to your site is another thing altogether. It takes a lot of trial and error to hit upon a winning formula.

 

Well, I’ve come across a few winning formulas in my time and I would like to share them with you in this post. Each one of the following tips is tried, tested and practically guaranteed to boost traffic to your WordPress website. Enjoy!

 

1. Optimize Your Posts in The SERPs

 

Most bloggers are obsessed with ranking in Google, but what many don’t realize is that how your post is displayed on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in Google can make a big difference too.

 

 

   

Broadly speaking there are two things you should concern yourself with:

1.     The Title: you may want to change this so that it is more appropriate to people using Google to search for information.

2.     The Description: you should always write a meta description for your posts to give people a clear idea of what they can expect if they click. 

   
   

Customizing the title and description is a piece of cake with the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. Just make the changes via the meta box on the Post screen:

 

 

That’s all there is to it — Google will pick up the information and use it within their SERPs.

 

2. Add Breadcrumbs

 

Breadcrumbs navigation is great for usability — it gives visitors to your site an immediate idea of where they are relative to your site’s structure and enables them to navigate through your site with ease.

 

But there is a secondary benefit to breadcrumbs: they add another dimension to your site’s appearance in the SERPs.

 

 

 

As you can see, breadcrumbs included on your site are also displayed within the SERPs. This gives searchers more information about your site before they’re even on it, which can’t be a bad thing.

 

Enabling breadcrumbs on your site is a relatively straightforward affair and uses the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin again. 

 

3. Split Test Your Headlines

 

If you have been blogging for any length of time then you will know all about the importance of headlines. The same post can be a complete flop or go viral on the strength of its headline alone.

 

With that in mind, one of the most effective things you can do to boost traffic to your site is split test your headlines. This is easily done with the Title Split Testing for WordPress plugin. It enables you to create two or more headlines for each post and/or page that you write, then randomly presents them to visitors and measures the click through rate.

 

After a number of clicks you will be able to decide which headline is the most successful and conclude the split test. The benefits of this are immediate, but even better, if you take note of trends (i.e. what kinds of headlines perform best) you can create better headlines for your readers in the future.

 

4. Interlink Your Pages

 

In my opinion, few things are more important to boosting engagement on a blog than linking between your posts (i.e. interlinking). Many visitors to your site will initially be blind to your navigation and you will find that the only way to compel them to explore your site further is to include links to related posts directly within your content.

 

As such, I recommend that you include as many relevant links to related posts on your blog as possible when creating blog posts. However, this is not always that easy with WordPress’ default search functionality (which leaves a lot to be desired).

 

That is why I swear by the Better Internal Link Search plugin. While WordPress default search functionality will look for your chosen keyword literally anywhere within all of your posts and pages and return results in chronological order, Better Internal Link Search will consider only post and page titles.

 

 

 Given that you are likely to be able to remember at least one or two words from the title of the post you are linking to, the process of interlinking becomes far easier with this plugin.

 

5. Include Related Posts

 

You are probably familiar with the concept of including related posts at the bottom of an article — something like this:

 

 

Included relating posts is a proven way of boosting engagement by giving visitors a clear opportunity to continue reading content on your site. However, you may (quite reasonably) be wondering what related posts has to do with driving more traffic to your site. 

 

That’s where Zemanta comes in. It provides related posts not only from your own site but from others. This works both ways — if you are part of the Zemanta service then other blogs will also link to yours. Zemanta claims that using their plugin can boost external traffic referrals by 5%.

 

If you are confident that you can keep people from leaving your site and think that your content is compelling enough to draw people from other sites to yours, Zemanta is an option well worth considering.  

 

6. Re-Tweet Archived Posts

 

I am a huge fan of Twitter — I think it is by far the most accessible social network in terms of being able to build a following and drive traffic. Not only that, you can automate the flow of traffic from Twitter to your site with the Evergreen Post Tweeter plugin.

 

The process is simple: you link the plugin to your Twitter account and it re-tweets archived posts on your blog based upon criteria that you set (such as specific categories/tags, how often tweets should be published and within what times). Evergreen Post Tweeter then does the rest:

 

 

Archived posts are periodically posted to your Twitter profile and your Twitter followers will click on them, thus discovering old content and re-engaging them with your blog. Furthermore, they may re-tweet your posts, leading to their discovery by people who hadn’t previously heard of you. 

 

In order to get the most out of this plugin, I recommend that you create a specific tag (e.g. “Tweetable”) for only those posts that you think are “evergreen” and worthy of being promoted. Then set Evergreen Post Tweeter to only tweet out those posts.

 

What Tips Do You Have?

 

The six tips above are some of my favorites, especially because they are so actionable — you can implement them in moments and start to reap the benefits immediately. And that’s what we all want at the end of the day: actionable tips that we can put into practice.

 

However, I have really only scratched the surface above in terms of utilizing WordPress to drive more traffic to your site. Which is why I want your help now. What do you do to drive more traffic to your WordPress site? Do you have any tips to share? Please let us know in the comments section below!

 

Alternatively, if you have any questions at all about the above tips (or about building traffic in general), do not hesitate to ask.