How To Increase Traffic On A Website For Free

Search Engine Traffic

The best way to get free traffic is from search engines. Primarily, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. This means you need to learn a bit about SEO (search engine optimization). But it’s pretty simple really, with the right tools. And many tools are free! All you need is a keyword research tool and some ideas.

I recommend the Jaaxy keyword research tool. You can use it for free. There are some upgrades available if you need more results. (You get the Lite version included with a Wealthy Affiliate membership with a few extra features).

Jaaxy keyword research tool

The idea is to put in some phrases or words that are relevant to your niche or information you want to share with your visitors. Then you can see if people are searching for those words or information and how many people searched for them. You can even see how many competing websites there are for these words. I have a Guide on Keywords in Search Engines here.

One thing that helps rank your site in the search engines is backlinks. These are links from other websites to yours. If you’re established (about 12-15 articles and 2-3 months old), you might want to reach out to similar websites and see if they are open to trade links, or if they could use content like yours to link to. 

If you’re new to this, work on creating more content and eventually, backlinks may happen naturally. I have one article on my niche/passion site that has backlinks that happened naturally, after my site was 2 months old. 

After you have some content built up, you can start reaching out to other website owners and pursue getting some backlinks to help increase traffic. It helps you rank better in Google, especially. 

Google Search Console and Google Analytics

Honestly, don’t get too hung up on these tools, especially right away. It takes some time for the search engines to like your site. They like sites that are established. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get indexed in a fairly short period of time. Just don’t waste a lot of time on these when you could be writing more content, which the search engines love!

Google Search Console measures traffic and traffic sources or your website.

The other Google tool, Google Analytics, gives more data on what pages visitors viewed, how long they stayed on each page, and the user flow of visitors on your site.

how to increase traffic to a website for freeI just wanted to touch on these two tools for webmasters. They measure traffic and traffic sources. And, Google Search Console has a tool allowing you to add new pages to Google. It’s called ‘URL Inspector’. Both of these tools will ask you to place code in the header of your site to verify it’s yours.

There are plugins to help with this in WordPress. If you feel somewhat confident, I like Ad Inserter for putting code in my site. It’s handy because you can also place affiliate link ads on your site in strategic places as well. If that’s too much, there are simpler ‘Header/Footer’ plugins. Just follow the directions and you’ll be tracking your traffic in no time.

And let Google know [URL Inspector] when you have new content so it can index your new posts. Just copy the address of the page or post into the tool and press enter. It will then add it to it’s crawl queue.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing and Yahoo! have kind of partnered up so Bing Webmaster Tools works for both of them. I love it. It has a similar process for setup as Google’s tools but once it’s set up, it’s very user-friendly. And it’s also super easy to add your new content to this tool as well.

Social Media

Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram. Just to name a few. Once you get to the point of adding a Social Media plugin (if using WordPress), you can then share your articles on your social media feed. (I like Sassy Social Share).

how to increase traffic to a website for freeI recommend creating a Facebook Page and Group for your website. But you can share your articles either on your personal feed or your business Page and/or Group (with your social share icons installed on your site with the plugin). This is a great way to get free exposure.

You’ll see a Create menu option in Facebook. Under that, you can choose to create a page and/or group for your business, for free.

You can share your articles with Pinterest with your social share plugin. Pinterest sharing allows you to choose an image or graphic from your article as a ‘Pin’ and on Pinterest itself, you can add the link to your site or your article. 🙂 Pinterest is very visual so good pictures (or graphics) are a must. HINT: There are four hours of video training for Pinterest on Wealthy Affiliate for Premium members.

Twitter is super easy. You can use a social share icon for that too. Make sure to set up an account if you haven’t. Again, set up a business account for your website. All of these accounts are free to set up and use.

For any of these social media accounts, make sure to put # (hashtags) in front of your keywords in the description. Ex. #pursuemypassion as part of the description. You will be prompted to enter a description after you click the Share button. That way, people looking for your information can find it a lot easier.

Quora and Forums

forumsIf you haven’t checked out Quora yet, it’s an answer sharing site. What a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. There are topics on almost everything under the sun. https://quora.com. Food, writing, health, interesting information. You name it, it’s there. You might start just following others and asking questions of your own to get the hang of it. Before long though, you can start giving answers and include a link to your site.

If you find other forums along the way, you can do the same thing. Help others and provide answers to questions and include the link to your site.

Conclusion

So we’ve covered the best ways to increase traffic to a website for free. There are paid ways to drive traffic to a website too, but why spend money, especially in the beginning. Get to know how everything works, focus on the free tools and then you can make informed decisions when you want to start paying for traffic. If ever.

I hope you learned some things about getting traffic to a website organically. If you have any questions, comments or experience to share, please leave them in the Comments section below. Thank you!

4 thoughts on “How To Increase Traffic On A Website For Free”

  1. The way to increase traffic on a website for free is to have a very good knowledge of what types of things rank content in SEO and how you can effectively market in social media while not getting hung up on what is going on and just keep creating more. Webmaster tools needs to know new content right away.

    Reply
  2. I learned several things from reading this blog, that I hadn’t learned before, such as what Google Search Console and Google Analytics are. I have read blogs of people asking questions about these two items and couldn’t be of any assistance because I didn’t know what they were or used for.

    On your point about backlinks, you used the term “established”. What do you mean by established? How much content do you need to have built up before adding backlinks?

    One thing I have had confusion about, is the use of graphics from Pinterest. Are these images you have taken and added to Pinterest or can you use a graphic from Pinterest to your website and are the graphics free?

    I have used Facebook for several years and it is the only one of the social medias that I am familiar with. You recommended creating a Facebook Page and Group to our website. This is something that I am not familiar with at all.

    This was a very informative blog and I did learn several points regarding increasing your traffic on your website for free. I am interested in reading more blogs from your website. 

    Reply
    • Thanks, Charlotte. Great questions. I would say ‘established’ means more than 10-15 articles on your niche site. 

      When you press the Pinterest Share button on a website (including yours), it opens a window that allows you to choose one of the graphics from that page. You choose the one you want to use for that ‘pin’. So you could actually post several pins with different graphics for the same post. 🙂

      When in Facebook, you’ll see in the menu the word: Create. Then you can create a Page, Group or whatever else you want to create for your business. 🙂

      Thanks so much for reading and commenting. 

      Reply

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