As a site owner, one of your goals will likely be to attract more visitors, as this is one of the best ways to encourage people to check out your content, converting them into fans or customers.

But to do this, you’ll want to increase your website traffic. This probably means increasing your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and applying other techniques to grow your audience, as well.

In this post, you’ll learn about some of the techniques and tools available (including ones that come with Jetpack), to help you increase website traffic and attract new readers, fans, and customers.

Making your site easier to find

If you want to increase the number of people visiting your site, make it easier for search engines like Google to find and identify the information and keywords (also known as “crawling”) that you use.

Adding an XML sitemap gives search engines a file they can use to determine the structure of your site. Then, they will effectively crawl it without missing any important information that might help you rank higher in search results.

Activate XML sitemaps through your Jetpack settings to turn on this essential SEO feature.

Formatting your post titles for SEO

One of the ways you can enhance your site’s SEO is by making the titles of your posts and pages display in ways that tell search engines more about your site and content. This also improves the way your site appears in search results. With Jetpack, you can customize how content titles display, so when someone sees your entry among their search results, they will be presented with the most useful information about your site, which might encourage them to click through to it.

For example, you can reorder items such as your site’s name and tagline, and add your own custom separators between them.

Optimizing meta descriptions

A meta description is the text that appears beneath your site’s name on a page of search results. Below, you’ll notice the meta description for Jetpack’s homepage; it’s the gray text beneath the URL.

The words that you include in your meta descriptions will be viewed by people who come across your page after performing searches. So, although these won’t affect your site’s chances of showing up in search results, it may affect the chances of people clicking through to your site. Making the meta description attractive and enticing can earn you more clicks and visitors.

In addition to optimizing the meta description of your homepage, you can also optimize it for internal pages (especially for landing pages designed to increase site traffic).

Previewing your search results

Before you publish your posts or pages, you can preview what they’ll look like on a search engine results page with an SEO preview tool.

Activate this tool before publishing your content, and you can see exactly how a page will look among search results. If you’re not satisfied with its appearance, you can edit your post or its settings before publishing it.

Easily sharing content

A great way to increase website traffic is to share your content across your social media channels. This increases the number of people who view your content, and might encourage them to click through to your website.

In your Jetpack settings, specify which social media channels you want to share to (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), provide your login credentials, and Jetpack will automatically share your new content to these pages. You can even create your own custom sharing buttons, which will make it even easier for visitors to share your site with their own followers.

Encouraging site visitors to share content from your site is extremely powerful. This can be seen as a form of validation, as they are touting your services to their friends and family, and might broaden your potential audience to include these important contacts.

You can add sharing buttons through your settings page, and they will automatically be added to all of your new posts. This will prevent any missed opportunities to distribute your content to more people.

Analyzing visitor numbers and behavior

To ensure that your SEO efforts are paying off, monitor your Site Stats and Google Analytics to determine what content is the most popular, and which pages people are leaving your site from. This will give you insight into your users’ experiences.

This can help you plan future content and identify which pieces of content you want to boost through social media outreach or other types of marketing. If a certain type of post attracts a lot of visitors, then it makes sense to write more posts like it, and to boost its presence.

Jetpack comes with basic stats built in, which can help you track how many people have been visiting your site and from what sources. If you have a Premium or Professional plan, you can enhance this by linking your site to your Google Analytics account and seeing detailed stats right from your site dashboard, like ecommerce tracking support and detailed reporting for products, conversions, and shopping cart behavior.

Increase your site traffic with the power of SEO and social engagement

Employing these tools and techniques can help you increase website traffic by making it easier for search engines to index your site, encouraging visitors to click through to your content, and allowing fans to share it across their own social media accounts.

Have any of these tools given your website traffic a boost? We’d love to hear from you!