One of the most frequent questions from website owners is how to get more people to visit their site. There’s no magic formula, but there are ways to get more views with a few tools and best practices.
In this guide
With a few clicks, you can advertise your content on some of the millions of pages across WordPress.com and Tumblr using our service called Blaze.
With Blaze, you can run ads on other sites to increase traffic to your site. Control the appearance, audience, and budget of your ads and monitor the performance of your campaigns.
Visit our Blaze support guide to learn how to turn your site content into clean, compelling ads running across our millions-strong blog network.
Search engines such as Google and Bing can potentially drive high amounts of traffic to your website. To help search engines discover your website and feature it in their search results, you can employ some strategies to optimize your content (known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.)
By having a website on WordPress.com, we take care of a lot of Search Engine Optimization for you, particularly the underlying technical aspects that ensure search engines can read your website. Beyond that, we recommend verifying your site with search engines and optimizing your content with keywords:
Search engines like Google offer tools to improve your site’s performance on their platforms. While Google will still list your site in their results if you don’t connect to Google Search Console, their tool helps you measure your site’s traffic from Google, fix potential issues, and set your site up for SEO success.
Visit our Site Verification Services guide to learn how to connect your website to several search engines and platforms, including Google Search Console, Bing, and Facebook.
Keywords are terms that your target audience might use when searching for your site. Ensure your site is well-indexed in search engines by using keywords throughout your website content.
To determine which keywords to include on your site, consider what you would search for if you were trying to find that information. For example, using the term “games for toddlers” in your pages and blog posts would be a good idea if you sell toys and games for young children.
Be careful about using too many keywords, though! If you use keywords excessively, your content will read awkwardly — and worse, search engines like Google will consider that “keyword stuffing,” so doing this can hurt your site’s ranking.
Join Our Free SEO Course
Understanding search engine optimization (SEO) is valuable for anyone looking to improve their site or blog for both search engines and humans. This course will give you a solid foundation of what you can do to ensure people have the best chance to find your content when they search online.
If you have a plugin-enabled site, you can use extra SEO tools to fine-tune your site’s appearance in search engines. Alternatively, you can install a plugin like Yoast SEO Premium for even more optimization features.
Don’t underestimate the power of your own networks to get the word out about your site.
Using auto-sharing, you can alert your social media networks to your new content. Set it up to automatically share your new posts to platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram Business so your friends and subscribers never miss an update.
Encourage friends and family to read your blog too. Send them reminder emails when you update, and talk to them about it when you meet in person. Encourage them to sign up for updates by placing a Subscribe block prominently on your site.
The internet is full of theories about raising your post’s visibility in search rankings. None will contest that original, high-quality content with a few well-chosen tags is a great way to start. Blogs with frequent and regular posting schedules tend to develop an audience more quickly.
Blogging isn’t just for hobbyists. Businesses, organizations, and professionals can blog to boost their site’s traffic and get noticed. In fact, blogging regularly is still one of the most important things you can do to increase your site’s SEO performance.
Even if you have a website with mostly static content, adding a “Blog” or “News” section that you regularly update helps search engines see that your site is active.
WordPress.com is a community in addition to a website-building platform. If blogging is part of your online presence, engage with other bloggers via the WordPress.com Reader. Read, comment on, and link to other blogs to connect with others in your niche and grow your community. Getting connected with other sites is a great way to find new readers, as well as become part of the global community of writers, bloggers, and content creators here.
Even if you do all of the above, you won’t develop a huge following overnight. Building a sizable audience of engaged and loyal readers takes time. Many website owners you admire have likely been at it for years. Stick with it, and don’t get discouraged by a slow start.
In one of our webinars, we discussed in detail how to find and grow your site’s audience. Watch below:
