3 Tips to Increase Your Site’s Traffic and Engagement

Note: Publicize is now auto-share and is part of Jetpack Social.

Imagine that you’re opening up a riding camp for horse enthusiasts. How can you encourage more campers to participate? This isn’t your typical business, so you wouldn’t expect its success to depend on website traffic; however, every business grows or fades due in part to the popularity of its website. To succeed, your riding camp’s website must attract and engage its visitors.

Whether you’re a blogger or a business owner, producing valuable content for your visitors is a must — but it’s only the first step. If you want your hard work to pay off with tangible results, you’ll need to find ways to place interesting content in front of your ideal audience members to keep them coming back.

So, how do you get started? There are several ways to promote your content, including sharing posts on your social media channels or improving your site’s search engine optimization.

Boost your traffic with Publicize

Our first tip is to share your content on social media as soon as it’s published. Your latest post on equestrian trends won’t reach enough readers if you’re not sharing it across your social media channels.

Manually sharing content every time you publish a new post can be tedious, though, especially if you schedule them in advance. But with Jetpack’s Publicize feature, you can automatically share new posts to your social media profiles the moment they’re published.

To enable Publicize, go to Jetpack > Settings > Sharing and toggle the Automatically share your posts to social networks option to “on.” Then connect and authorize each of your social media accounts.

Connect the social media accounts you use to share your newest content immediately.

With Publicize enabled, your newest posts will be published to your social media channels immediately. Now you can reach a wider audience with almost no manual effort. Those who read your posts will understand you’re an expert in the field of horseback riding, and your passion might draw them to your other posts — and to your new camp.

Increase engagement with sharing options

Sharing your own content is great, but if you want to further increase your website traffic, make sure that your readers can share your content with their followers as well. This is where Jetpack’s Sharing feature comes into play.

The Sharing feature in Jetpack lets visitors share your content to their own Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn feeds. You can also create custom share buttons, or change the position of sharing icons if you need to.

You can change your sharing options in Jetpack’s settings.

Sharing increases your site engagement, as your website visitors can interact with you and your content. If site visitors have the option to share your blog post about the benefits of teaching horseback riding to children with their followers, they will be more likely to remember and care about your business.

To enable the Sharing feature, go to Settings > Sharing and toggle on Add sharing buttons to your posts. From here, you can choose the style of buttons you want to display, and add or remove networks. You can also select whether you want to display buttons on your posts, pages, products, or archives.

Improve your search engine ranking with a few optimizations

Search engine optimization (better known as SEO) helps search engines like Google index your posts and pages to better understand your site. Optimizing your site for higher search engine rankings is crucial if you want future fans to find it.

Creating quality content is the first stop on your quest to better SEO. Once you publish and share posts or pages that are relevant to potential riders, some basic SEO strategies will increase the likeliness of your site turning up in search results. Some SEO strategies are easier to implement than others, but still produce big results.

Some starter tips:

• Use relevant words and phrases in the titles of your posts. Search engines aren’t people — keywords make it easier for them to understand what your content is about (and what searches it should appear in!).
• Choose a theme with simple, logical navigation. If a visitor can’t find the information they want, they’ll quickly “bounce,” which is a signal Google tracks to determine the usefulness of websites.
• Sprinkle your content with links to relevant posts or pages on your site. This both keeps visitors reading and helps search engines find your other pages easily, plus understand what’s related.

For more ideas, Google has a handy how-to guide for improving SEO on your own — read it here.

Once you’re comfortable with SEO, take your strategy one step further with Jetpack’s SEO tools. With a Jetpack Professional plan and these tools, you can customize how page titles on your WordPress site appear, create and customize meta descriptions (the text that appears on a search engine results page) for your site’s pages, and preview how various social channels will display your content.

With our SEO tools, you can change your titles and meta descriptions to be friendlier to searchers — and search engines.

Watch your numbers grow

Increasing your website traffic isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. Despite the crowded online marketplace, smart SEO and social media strategies make it possible to stand out and attract new visitors who may eventually become subscribers or paying customers.

Make it a goal to try one of the tips mentioned above, and see if your website traffic grows. If it does, we’d love to know what worked for you!

How do you increase traffic and engagement on your own site? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.

Brenda Barron

Brenda Barron is a freelance writer, editor, and SEO specialist from southern California. She is a contributor to The Motley Fool and blogs regularly at The Digital Inkwell.