<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/42092103_s-300x210.jpg" alt="WordPress Website Traffic" width="300" height="210" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-10409" />After creating the best-looking, most functional site ever, you may be wondering why nobody has visited it. When you create a WordPress website, you cannot just use The Field of Dreams motto of, "If I build it, they will come." You need to do specific things to help drive traffic to your website. Here are 10 of the best tips you can use to help you get traffic to your new WordPress website.

<h2>Use Yoast SEO</h2>

One of the easiest ways to start your marketing is to install the Yoast SEO Plugin. This plugin will allow you to setup your site for SEO success. It will help you add meta tags, Twitter Cards, Breadcrumbs, an XML sitemap, Facebook OpenGraphs and more. 

<h2>Share Socially and Make it Automatic</h2>

Social media is probably the best way to gain traffic to any WordPress website today. When you share socially, you have the opportunity to go viral or at least to get in front of some eyes. 

The best part about sharing your blog posts socially is that you can automate the process. By using a service, such as Hootsuite or Buffer, you can schedule your WordPress posts to go out to your social media accounts automatically.

<h2>Create Engaging, Useful Content

Your WordPress site will never attract the right attention without great content. You need to engage your audience and give them something they can use. Content is still king and it always will be. If you want to gain traffic to your new website, make sure the content you put on your blog and your pages is high quality.

You may be better off hiring a professional writer to create content for you. If you're not a very good writer or it takes you forever to create a blog posts, this may be a task to outsource to a professional writer.

<h2>Use Internal Linking Often</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/7041384_s-300x225.jpg" alt="Internal Linking" width="300" height="225" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-10407" />The most successful blogs and websites always link to their older posts and to pages. They know that internal linking not only helps the search engines understand how important your content is, but it also allows for a better user experience. Anytime it makes sense to link to an older post, do it. This will give you a better SEO score and it will help keep users on your site longer.

<h2>Allow Sharing and Make it Easy</h2>

Again, social media is a great source of traffic. Not only should you be sharing your own posts, but you should also make it easy for your readers to share your posts. With the right plugin, you can add social buttons to every post at the bottom or top. This makes it easy for readers to share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and other social media platforms.

You should also add the "Pin It" button to all of your images. This makes it easy for readers to share your images all over Pinterest.

<h2>Join the Conversation</h2>

As traffic starts to come in and people comment on your blog posts, you need to join the conversation. People don't like to feel ignored or like they left a comment for no reason. Make sure you take the time to reply to every comment you receive and engage your users.

<h2>Build Your Email List</h2>

After coming to your WordPress site, three out of every four visitors will never come back on their own. However, if you offer something free of charge if they subscribe to your list, you will have direct access to invite them back. This allows you to better engage your visitors and get them to come back for another blog post or something else. There's no good excuse to keep you from building an email list.

<h2>Use High Quality Images</h2>

Images help engage your readers much better than text. When you choose high quality images, it makes your blog even better. You want to buy the pictures from a service, such as Shutterstock or take your own pictures. There are plenty of royalty free images out there, but you want to make sure you're going further than just some simple clipart. 

<h2>Make Your Site Faster</h2>

A fast WordPress website makes a big difference. When you add plugins, such as WP Super Cache to help speed up your website, you gain SEO points with Google and other search engines. You can also add plugins to decrease the size of your images and many others to help speed up your WordPress website.

<h2>Use SSL for Your Site</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/7065603_s-300x199.jpg" alt="SSL Certificate" width="300" height="199" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-10408" />Adding SSL to your site has become very popular and a great way to gain a small ranking boost. It's a big change for your urls, as they will go from http to https, but it can make a difference. You can buy an SSL certificate or you can add it free with Let's encrypt.

Using these ten tips will help you gain traffic to your WordPress website. Remember, these are not tips to help you gain a ton of traffic overnight. It takes time to build a highly successful WordPress website. You need to use these tips and continue to build your blog, share on social media and make improvements.
