How to get Visitors

After you’ve created a website, your prior goal is to gain an audience and visitor base for your site. This article will give you some tips on how to do this. It’s good to keep track of your site’s statistics - unique hits, referrers, search queries using a tracker or some sort of web analytics tool. I’d suggest getting an Extreme Tracker, Google Analytics account or Clicky. And if you’re using Wordpress, there are few available plugins that are useful in keeping track of your site’s statistics, such as Statpress or Slimstat.

Ways to get more Visitors

Comment on other people’s sites

Commenting on other people’s sites is helpful for both gaining hits and getting people to comment on your blogs. Personal sites usually have an “I’ll comment you if you comment me” system, whether this is considered a mannerly behaviour or commenting etiquette, I don’t know, but take the time to read other people’s blogs and they will do the same for you.

Join Message Boards / Forums

Joining message boards and forums is an effective way to gaining recognition for your site. You become part of a community composed of people who share the same interests as you and can relate to what you do. You are able to receive feedback for your site and if you have a forum signature or a mini profile with a link to your site, this would automatically lead people to it and it would also be considered as ‘back links’ for search engines to boost your page rank. Regardless of whether you are doing this for hits or not, it’s good to make some friends online through message boards and have fun.

Plug your Site on Plugboards

Some sites have plugboards, even popular sites like Ego Box. Plugging your button/link to these sites would be like putting up ads on notice boards in real life. It’s a good way to get hits and a free alternative to advertise your site.

Join Topsites / Ad Rotations

There are several top sites and ad rotation services out there. These will require you to have a link to their site on yours, so if you’re willing to make some sidebar space, this option is good for you. Top sites are similar to voting or referral contents. The more hits in, the higher your ranking will go. If you manage to find yourself at the top of the list on a top site website, then more people will click on your site and you’ll get more hits in yourself. Ad rotations are like rotating buttons on a person’s website that will lead to yours, but you will also do the same for them by putting up an ad rotation script. People will be rotating your site and you will be theirs. This is a similar concept to link exchanging, but this is more ad orientated.

Get Affiliates / Link Exchanges

Apply for affiliates with other people, sites that you think are good. Don’t do this purely for hits, and consider affiliates as friends. The best thing about a personal site regime is the fact that you befriend others who are also interested in the web and graphic design scene, even if they’re not, you’ll find that you’ll have a lot to relate to. If you’re considering doing it solely for hits, then I’d suggest link exchanges, where there are no requirements and you just exchange links with other people. You put their link up and they’ll do the same for you.

Submit your site to Search Engines

Submit your site to different search engines: Add Me is a service that helps you submit your site to 20 popular search engines for free. This will enable people to search different queries and be led to your site. If you optimize your site for search engines correctly, then you have a lot of hits to gain through these searches. Search for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips and look up some tutorials to optimize your site. If you use Wordpress, there are free plugins such as the All in One SEO Pack, which helps you optimize your Wordpress blog for search engines by creating META tags, canonical URLs, etc.

Advertise on Neopets Boards

By advertising on Neopets boards, you’ll gain a short burst of visitors. Depending on whether your site is good, these visitors may become long-term ones. Majority of the Neopets demographic looks for graphics and premades, this especially applies to those who don’t know how to make graphics or code themselves. Then there are those who create graphics, so they may look for brushes, textures, stocks and other resources to help them do so. If you’re looking to attract more of the Neopets demographic, then I’d suggest creating Neopets-based content such as userlookups, guild layouts and premade CSS. Please note that advertising on Neopets boards is against the rules, so if you’re looking to advertise on Neopets, then you should use a side account, that is if you’re a Neopets user. If not, just create an account and advertise your heart away. The best board for advertising graphic, resource or personal sites is the Guild boards. Unless you’re unfortunate enough to come across one of those “YOU BROKE THE RULES!” kind of people, this is the best place to advertise and it’s where most people are graphic orientated and are looking for this type of content.

Making them Come Back

Even if you find a way to get a lot of visitors, they may just come once and then forget about it ever existing another day. Here are some tips in making visitors come back for more.

Update your site

If you update your site every now and again, people will check back to see what new content you’ve got. If you rarely update your site, your visitors will have nothing new to return to. Spice things up, change your layout to give a fresher appearance for the visitors who’ve been staring at your layout for a long time. Take the time to maintain your site and your hard work will be noticed by others.

Compatibility

Your site should be compatible with popular browsers, resolutions, etc. This is a hard thing to do, because every browser renders things differently. But if your site is completely screwed up in a browser, then you’ll need to do something about it. If visitors can’t access your site, how do you think you’re going to maintain a visitor base? I suggest personally testing your site by downloading all the commonly used browsers and accessing your site from them. But if you don’t bother with all of that, Browsershots is a good site to get live screen shots on how your site looks on different browsers. This article also tackles different solutions to many problems regarding browser compatibility, I suggest reading it. It’s impossible to get your site looking perfect on all browsers, but at least try to consider your visitors and the fact that everyone uses different mediums to access your site. Solve these compatibility issues, if you find yourself stuck, a Google search can do wonders.

Content

Your content is what people come to your site for. May it be a simple blog, a site that provides graphics and resources or a recipe site, quality content is important. Quality over quantity applies here. Don’t create tons of crappy things that no one will ever use. Learn to know your demographic and what people actually use the most of. This is where a tracker comes in handy. Google Analytics provides statistics that show which pages are the most viewed and accessed. Use this information to your advantage. If you find that a lot of people are visiting your ‘Premade Layouts’ page, then create more of it. Ask your visitors what they’d want more of, listen to your audience’s opinions because they’re the ones who are visiting your site and using your content.

Properly Written

Your content should be well written and not incomprehensible writing that no one can understand. I’m not telling you to become the next J.K Rowling, but your grammar and spelling is important. Don’t write in chat speak, this is not MSN. Firefox has its own spell checker, make use of that. You don’t have to write perfectly, but I personally would not visit a site whose owner does not make the effort to pay attention to his/her own writing. When I return comments and I find a site that has a blog written so poorly, I find myself incapable of properly reading the blog without getting a migraine.

Create Activities

Start some activities or contests on your site. Some popular forms of contents range from site of the months, referral, free domain name, graphic contests. These allow interaction between your site and its visitors and people will check back for progress. It also exposes your site in many different ways, because contests normally require a link back on the participants site.

Return Comments

Having the decency to return comments is important. People comment you and you should make the effort to comment back. This will show people what a driven person you are and that you actually take the time to return comments to those who visit you. People usually visit sites of the those who comment back, because they know that when they have just blogged, they can rely on these sites to comment on their new blog. Meaning they will come back every now and again to comment on your site.

Conclusion

Getting a lot of visitors is hard work, but it will be paid off once you get your site up and running. It’s not awfully hard, all you have to do is give some effort in maintaining your site, don’t slack off and play the Sims when you’re supposed to be working on your site like I do most of the time. These are merely tips as to how you can improve your traffic and gain more visitors. At the very end of the day, it still relies on your site itself, the quality of your work. If you have the talent, you will be noticed. If you don’t have godly powers and extremely gifted skills, you’ll just have to hone them, it’s all a learning curve.