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6 Easy Steps to Increase Traffic to Your WordPress Site

Tips to Increase Traffic to Your WordPress Website

If you’re anything like me, you’re on a constant journey to increase 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 ain’t 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 increase 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.

Optimize Your Posts in The SERPs to Increase Traffic

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 Yoast SEO plugin. Just make the changes via the meta box on the Post screen:

Yoast SEO Snippet Settings

That’s all there is to it – Google will pick up the information and use it within their SERPs and hopefully a more attractive and clickable snippet will help increase traffic to your site.

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.

Add Breadcrumbs to Increase Traffic

Breadcrumbs on a website…

Breadcumbs in Google SERP

…leads to breadcrumbs in Google.

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. You can learn how to add breadcrumbs to WordPress site with this step-by-step tutorial.

3. Split Test Your Headlines to Increase Traffic

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 increase 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.

Default WordPress Internal Link Search

This…

Better WordPress Internal Link Search

… becomes this.

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. If you already use Jetpack you can add related posts to your blog by simply enabling the feature. They should look something like this:

Jetpack Related Posts Module

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 a related posts plugin comes in. Most of the best related posts plugins allow you to specify how you want your related posts generated – via categories, tags, recent posts ,authors etc. Plus there are typically options for what/how you want information for your related items show on posts (thumbnail, title, excerpt and more).

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 increase traffic (I even wrote a post just about driving traffic to your site with Twitter). Not only that, you can automate the flow of traffic from Twitter (as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumbler and Xing) to your site with the Revive Old Post 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 post types, how often tweets should be published and within what times).

Revive Old Post Settings

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.

What Tips Do You Have to Increase Traffic?

The six tips above are some of my favorites, especially because they are so actionable – you can implement them in moments and start to increase traffic 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 increase traffic to your site. Which is why I want your help now. What do you do to increase 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 to increase traffic (or about building traffic in general), do not hesitate to ask.

increase-traffic-wordpress-website
Article by Tom Ewer WPExplorer.com guest author
98 Comments
  1. jumadenice · 11 years ago

    I have been using SEO by Yoast to drive traffic to my website and it has been doing wonders for me, with in a week I have garnered thousands of unique hits, views and bandwidth is getting to GBs. The additional plugins that you have talked about above are a remedy to more hits. Thanks and keep up the sharing spirit

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

      That’s awesome! I love WordPress SEO by Yoast, makes front-end SEO super easy…the built-in breadcrumbs and sitemaps is super handy also. Best wishes!

    • andalan69 · 11 years ago

      thanks for the info may be useful, we wait for more info.

      • Your wordpress traffic blog tips are helpful. Thanks! · 9 years ago

        I think your tips on increasing traffic to wordpress blog is great and helpful, it is worth considering.
        Thank your well written post concerning wordpress traffic increase tips and guides.
        Keep it up!

        Kind Regards

    • Uninstall · 8 years ago

      thanks for the suggestion i also tried this

  2. Agnel Waghela@agnel_waghela · 11 years ago

    Thanks Tom! For the Tips, They are very good. I also like the Image you used for the statistics!

    • Tom Ewer · 11 years ago

      My pleasure Agnel 🙂

  3. elliottrichmond · 11 years ago

    Don’t get overly hung up on SEO, think about your users and readability.

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

      Definitely! If your website provides value traffic will follow 😉 That said, some SEO optimization can never hurt!

    • jacquirawson · 8 years ago

      Good advice Elliott, I feel like I’m getting swamped with SEO and Google analytics stuff. When I set out I just wanted to write and hoped that what I wrote might come in handy for people. Have to try and refocus myself. Cheers!

  4. Tom Binga · 11 years ago

    Evergreen Post Tweeter seems it might fix a problem I’ve been trying to find a solution for. Nice article!

    • Tom Ewer · 11 years ago

      Thanks Tom 🙂

  5. Alex · 11 years ago

    I just started using IFTT (ifttt.com) “If This Then That” which is one of the coolest tools I have ever used – no joke. It can do automated posting from your blog to social media and many other things in addition. It comes with a collection of recipes for taking some action based on some condition (basic programming logic) but it is simple to use.

  6. Viv van der Holst · 11 years ago

    I have added most of the plugins you have suggested here in your post. Thanks a million for the info, will check it out and see how well it works and let you know.

  7. rishabh · 11 years ago

    i try writing creative content , on my wordpress site. but i am not able to generate much traffic. lets hope some of these tricks work for me too .

  8. Increase Website Traffic · 11 years ago

    Your post is always great and you have shared some great suggestions with us.I will use all suggestions.

    • WEB: Site Traffic Generation WP Blog · 9 years ago

      Well Yeah .. very educative and awesome website traffic tips. I learned something new here, so thank I landed on this page.Great post!

      Best Thanks!

  9. HS. Peters · 11 years ago

    Hello i truly enjoyed this article, thank you very much Tom for taking your time writing this all together.

    I’ve added The breadcrumbs and related posts, i think these two are crucial for my website. But i am very unsatisfied about the traffic to my website, the social network Facebook page is running much better. I am figuring out to drive more traffic to the website(for months).

    I always think good content in combination with SEO and Social Network will do the trick. But i am doing this for months now and i have an average of 1400 visitors per month.

    Can you or someone give me good advice?

    Thank you in advanced.

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

      Hi Peters,

      It is very hard to provide some suggestions without fully looking at your site statistics and monitoring it to see how you are ranking on search engines, how people are arriving to and engaging on your site. The only way you’ll be able to get some truly helpful suggestions is probably by hiring an SEO expert to take a closer look at what you are doing and what could be done better.

      Also, 1400 visitors a month, could possibly be good for your specific niche. That also plays a huge factor.

  10. Hanno Malmiste · 11 years ago

    These are very practical tips indeed. As a regular user of the Internet, I can relate to the first one about titles and descriptions displayed in the SERPs.

    You can usually tell just by looking at them what you are dealing with – if the text is stuffed with keywords and is grammatically incorrect, you might want to try something else.

    So yeah, spot on, that tip! 🙂

  11. Alex · 11 years ago

    I think interlinking posts is much better and easy way to increase page views and traffic.+ page rank

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

      Interlinking posts is a great idea! Having areas such as “related posts” and “popular posts” is a great way to do this, but also using a plugin like SEO smart links is a great way to interlink your posts.

  12. George · 11 years ago

    Good call on the Better Internal Link Search, it makes interlinking very easy!

  13. vimal nathwani · 11 years ago

    This is great advice and something we are going to try for ourselves. Thanks Tom!

  14. Itti · 11 years ago

    Actually we need to work on content with SEO titles too. Also work on social media to get more traffic. Above tips also very useful. Thanks

  15. Abinash Mohanty · 11 years ago

    Thanks Tom for the tips! These are quite helpful.

    • Tom Ewer · 11 years ago

      My pleasure Abinash 🙂

  16. Rana Irfan · 11 years ago

    Hi! I’ve been readіng your site for some time nοω and
    finally got the bravery to go ahеad and give you a shout out from Ηumble Texas!
    Just wanted to say keep up the fantastic work!

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

      Hi there Rana, nice to see you around our site! Thanks for stopping by and saying hi 😉

  17. saravanan · 11 years ago

    Thanks tom, i have red your article before one month and followed those steps. i got some difference with my site day by day. Hats off to you for such a great tips.

  18. John · 11 years ago

    The whole artilce is very useful to learn but evergreen post tweeter is something new for me and I definetly try this on my own blog to see the results.

    • Tom Ewer · 11 years ago

      Thanks John!

  19. Greg · 11 years ago

    Very true Not to think to much about SEO but the quality of your sites content
    Some forgo on the quality and their posts can look regurgitated
    I found concentrating on 2 or 3 social sites like Twitter,Facebook and Pinterest, replying to readers comments and interacting on your social sites will earn you more mentions which equals greater PR for your blog

    Thanks Tom

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

      Of course Tom! These are just 6 small tips, there are tons of things you can do. And like you said Content will always be king 😉 Freddy mentions that also in this post seo ranking post

  20. Nik Cree · 11 years ago

    I agree that quality of content is important, and it seems clear that SEO is useless unless you have quality content. I used to rely on SEO but now I tend to diversify to get traffic. I have been experimenting with getting traffic from forums as shown in mysitesuccess.com/9-simple-but-effective-ways-to-drive-traffic-with-forums/. Surprisingly, I have been getting results with this but it is too early to tell if it is a good long term strategy. Than aside I definitely still optimise all my pages and use Yoast’s WordPress SEO – it is excellent.

  21. glowbees · 11 years ago

    I have to say that when I find an article containing information I’ve never seen or learned about, my interest is immediately piqued.

    You sir, have piqued me! Ao, thank you for this post. I’m going to dive in and get my hands dirty.

    Well, not too dirty- I’m a girly girl.

    –Joy

    • AJ Clarke · 11 years ago

      Ha 😉 Well thanks for stopping by Joy hopefully you learned some good tips, good luck with your online ventures!

  22. Dorothy Le · 11 years ago

    Email marketing is also a great tool to use in conjunction with your WordPress blog. It is a great way to strengthen relationships with each reader, because you are taking the relationship from reader-going-to-blogger to blogger-going-to-reader. You are creating content that is sent directly to their inboxes, establishing your blog’s presence even in places that is not your actual blog site.

    With email marketing, you can send updates about your site, a personal thank-you for following, fun contests and giveaways, and even give a sneak-peek of your latest blog with a link that directs them to your blog site, thus increasing traffic.

    It all goes back to the tried-and-trued way of building a brand…you have to network and build relationships first, then you will see benefits coming in.

    Benchmark Email has an easy to use plugin that will connect your WordPress page to your Benchmark account, so you can doing all the fun email marketing stuff straight from your WordPress dashboard, including the analytics or rates and times of clicks.

    http://wordpress.org/plugins/benchmark-email-lite/

    Cheers!

    • AJ Clarke · 11 years ago

      Definitely Dorathy, email marketing is super important. That plugin looks nice, thanks for sharing!

  23. lesley kim · 11 years ago

    great tips!!

    • Tom · 11 years ago

      Thanks Lesley!

  24. uno-de-piera · 11 years ago

    The best for my Re-Tweet Archived Posts, awesome.

    Thanks!

  25. Trailblazer Travel Books · 10 years ago

    I’m diving in with all this information and hope it boosts visits to my blogs. Thanks team!

    • Tom Ewer · 10 years ago

      You’re welcome! 🙂

  26. GardeningLC · 10 years ago

    This honestly helped me alot! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

  27. jeangan · 10 years ago

    The Title Split Testing Plugin has not been updated for 2 years….hmm so am not sure if I should download and install it?

  28. johnfloster · 10 years ago

    I am facing traffic issue since 4 months, I have written unique contents for my blog why my is not ranking and zero visitors.

    • AJ Clarke · 10 years ago

      There is a lot more then just writing unique content to get visitors. You need to get people to link to your content from other sites so people can find it. Social media is a good way to do this, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus you can get a lot of traffic that way. You need to build up the brand and make it popular before it starts ranking. Also what you may consider unique content, may not really be that unique to Google. As well as depending on your niche you may have to do a lot more work to start getting traffic from search results and or other sites.

  29. itdosti · 10 years ago

    thanks alot your post is very informative keep it u up!!

  30. Pro Develpora · 10 years ago

    hi AJ ! i am not able to generate much traffic on my website i am new user of wordpress can you please help me which plugins are useful for my site. and how i can generate traffic

  31. Nin · 10 years ago

    Being just a beginner, found your tips really actionable(as you said). Have written down all the plugins that i need to install. Twitter is something i really need to work upon, i get lazy when it comes to socializing for my blog, but i guess it’s very imperative to get on to it!! Thanks. Keep posting more tips for beginners.

  32. Dividend Beginner · 10 years ago

    AJ,

    Thank you so much for these tips. Will definitely try using Zemanta and SEO by Yoast.

    Best Regards,
    Dividend Beginner

  33. Sudarto · 9 years ago

    Your article is very helpful. Of course, all the bloggers will be concerned with some plugins that you explained to increase traffic. I immediately check plugin I’ve installed on my blog. Thank you.

  34. ravigupta · 9 years ago

    Awesome post thank you for sharing. I have a lot of work you will find a lovely support.This post is very inspiring me. I always take your advices very seriously, thanks ones again.

  35. Sudarto · 9 years ago

    I am pleased to find your article on blog optimization to bring in a lot of traffic. What you describe is the practical things that can be practiced. Best wishes.

  36. Im in love with that girl · 9 years ago

    Very usefull… Thank you for sharing!

    • Tom Ewer · 9 years ago

      And thank you for reading! 🙂

  37. onapthanh · 9 years ago

    Love this post. I’ve been looking for a way to get a little more reach with my content. I’m really interested in checking out how to add images and links to posts to instagram. I’ll have to spend some time getting familiar with how to do that. Google+ is not bad either. In fact, few months back I was getting more traffic from Google+ than Twitter or Facebook.

  38. koiledexpress · 9 years ago

    I think linking to other bloggers in your posts may help you get noticed as well as long as their article you’re linking to is relevant to the post you created.

  39. Online Rewards · 9 years ago

    thanks for share you knowledge

  40. rajdeep7830 · 9 years ago

    That is very interesting; you’re a very skilled blogger. I have shared your website in my social networks! Thanks for distribution knowledge regarding some vital steps for white hat SEO.

  41. Barisaltimes24 · 9 years ago

    I am using SEO by yoast for my online Bengali news portal and now my website is indexed in search engine.But still i am not getting in the first page.Do you have any suggestion for me?

    • Kyla · 9 years ago

      Ranking on the first page of search engines takes a lot of work! There are so many factors involved with SEO ranking, more than what any plugin can do for you. I would suggest reading up on whatever tips SEO blogs like Moz and Yoast have to share – they’re the experts!

  42. Jaswinder · 9 years ago

    Great list of Plugins, but I tried All in One SEO, Yoast SEO and Squirrly. Nothing worked for me, any suggestion.

    • Kyla · 9 years ago

      Hmmm, I’m not sure what you mean since these plugins should help get you started on optimizing the SEO for your WordPress site. A lot of new WordPress users don’t know how to optimize keyword usage, add pretty-permalinks, optimize their XML sitemaps or to clean up their breadcrumbs on their own, which is why tried and true SEO plugins like Yoast are such a great asset. But you can’t really only on plugins, there are many factors that go into search rankings you need to focus on – so I would suggest following SEO focused blogs (like Yoast & Moz among many others) or if you’re really serious about your website SEO you can invest in an SEO audit. They are expensive but the company will help you create an invaluable SEO plan of attack. Hope this helps!

  43. ottenkarel · 9 years ago

    Nice article, i’m already using 5 out of the 6 tips provided, ever since i started my newest blog. The tip about the split headlines test is something i can still try.. Since i just started a week ago, i can’t say im doing good or bad yet 🙂

    The most important tip i can give is an easy but often underestimated and overlooked one:
    Write for your readers not for yourself. basically it means you have to build your blog and writing style around what your preferred readers expect to see, not around what you yourself wish it to be, This doesn’t mean you can’t show your personality in your blog and writing, just don’t go overboard. Let your content speak for you, instead of your layout and color choices.

    • AJ Clarke · 9 years ago

      That’s a great tip and very very important. Thank you for sharing and good luck with your new blog!

  44. Deepanker · 9 years ago

    Awesome post. I take care of interlinking and related posts while writing a content. Social media also helps a lot in getting traffic.

  45. John · 9 years ago

    Indeed a great post about website traffic.

    Nowadays It is very much hard for a blogger to drive targeted traffic to their website and without having targeted traffic, We can never drive customer and sales.

    Getting website traffic is the most important thing for any website.

    To have high website traffic, We must have to write high quality content which is very much important to hold the readers on our website for long period of time.

    We have to write engagging content which can help readers.

    I am glad that You can covered an amazing article on website traffic. Will definitely follow what you said in this article.

    Thanks for sharing it with us. 😀

  46. Sharique · 9 years ago

    Thank You wpexplorer.com for such a great article. This article pointed out many mistakes that I am doing since day 1.

  47. manish · 8 years ago

    thanku for this post. this post helped me more…..

  48. Ivailo Durmonski · 8 years ago

    Optimizing your website speed and submitting it to major search engines will also help you get more organic traffic in time. These are my two suggestions.

    • Kyla · 8 years ago

      Great tips!

  49. hitthepathgmailcom · 8 years ago

    I can’t wait to try these out on my travel blog. Thank you!

  50. anon · 8 years ago

    I’m new to blogging so this was really helpful!

  51. varsharthi · 8 years ago

    Hi, nice blog!
    Yoast plugin is also very helpful to make proper presence of your title, meta, alt and many more things. I follow your strategies to get updated and it helps to rank my site.

  52. buddyswagger · 8 years ago

    This is perfect site for wordpress learner

  53. Edos Ubebe · 8 years ago

    Awesome post buddy, thanks for sharing this with me. Stay blessed.

  54. Jaswinder Kaur · 8 years ago

    Tips on increasing traffic to wordpress blog is great and helpful.

    I write fresh content frequently and share with Pinterest, twitter as well as Facebook. Sometimes write comments on other’s blogs, these only methods I use to drive traffic to my website.

    I never spend any money for ads to drive traffic, just work hard for my Blog and it is doing good, making around $1000 monthly.

    Thanks.

  55. SANJAY · 8 years ago

    Thanks for the wonderful info, i have recently created my website and i was searching for information how to increase traffic then i got your article, now i have got key points to drive more traffic once again thanks for wonderful information

  56. SANJAY · 8 years ago

    this is great a very helpful article. i write blogs for my website and i never go for paid ads to drive traffic.

  57. ashleyjudd1020 · 7 years ago

    Thanks so much for this post. I love the way you can make things simple and doable and cut through all the confusion. I have your book and it is great too. 🙂

  58. GFR2 Reviews · 7 years ago

    I found that posting to social media really boosted my traffic as did repeating posts within a couple of days as not all my followers are online all the time and I wouldn’t want to miss any.

  59. zaman · 7 years ago

    Thanks for your information.

  60. spear digital web · 7 years ago

    Wow! Very nice Post. It’s really great. Well Done.

  61. Alexander · 7 years ago

    Thank you for sharing an amazing post to increase traffic to wordpress site. It is truue that content is one of the main factor to increase the website worth and traffic but also there are some other factors that can’t be neglected like design, social media tools, email list, internal linkings, seo plugins and lot more.

  62. alok kumar · 7 years ago

    Thanks for sharing such a nice blog! I will follow your strategies to get updated and it helps to rank my site.

  63. Shery Trinidad · 7 years ago

    Thank you for these tips! What can you say about inserting links to other bloggers’ posts? I read it somewhere but I am a bit hesitant to do this. I am new to blogging. Hope you can help shed some light. Thanks! 🙂

    • Kyla · 7 years ago

      We regularly link to other blogs and websites when relevant or when we think it will add value for our readers. I think it’s also a great way to start building a relationship with another blog. If you let them know you included their content in your post they might be more open to sharing your article on social media.

  64. Akun · 7 years ago

    Thanks so much for your sharing nice job and very useful

  65. Somali K Chakrabarti · 7 years ago

    Hi Tom, Thanks for the tips on how to increase traffic. Posting regularly on Google Plus collections can help in increasing traffic. The Title Split Test Plugin for WordPress seems to be no longer available. You may want to modify the post with an alternate option.

    • AJ Clarke · 7 years ago

      Hey there, this is Aj the boss around here 😉 Thank you for your added feedback. I’ll make sure to update the article right away, I really appreciate you stopping by and good tip on the Google Plus Collections, this isn’t something we’ve been doing and will start to do. thanks!

  66. John Mulindi · 7 years ago

    Hi, very good article. Am already implementing most of the mentioned ways above but learned some new ones – hopefully I’ll see a traffic boost. Thanks for sharing!

  67. Maggie Tuczapska · 7 years ago

    Amazing post, Tom, thank you! I agree that related posts can increase your SEO, as that way you increase the time spent on your website, and it’s a hugetastic SEO ranking factor for Google. Do you use external services like the one below to optimize your pages?

    • Kyla · 7 years ago

      We don’t use an external service – but we do use Yoast SEO premium to optimize our posts as best we can 🙂

  68. Rockey Smith · 7 years ago

    Hi, very good article, hopefully I’ll see a traffic boost. Thanks for sharing! and caring

  69. Lynne Rose · 6 years ago

    Excellent tips about how to increase traffic in wordpress website. I also applied this your 6 stape and good result show me. Thanks for sharing this article.

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