The What and The Why of Website Marketing and SEO
Getting traffic to your website is the first step in accomplishing your goal; whether that be to inform people, or to sell a product. To get traffic to websites many will use both website marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). Website marketing is a broad category, but it is essentially the marketing of your website. One way this is accomplished is by purchasing adds that appear on other sites and hopefully linking traffic back to your website. SEO is optimizing your website to appear higher in a list of search results. If your website appears higher in the search result listings you are much more likely to bring traffic to your website. A lot of money can be spent on both website marketing and search engine optimization; however, there are several free opportunities that every website needs to be taking advantage of.
Social Media
Social media generates a lot of traffic, and can be a great traffic generator for your website. It is also worth noting that doing a few social media sites well is better that having a basically inactive account with every social media provider. You want to be creating relevant content, news, updates, or providing new information relatively frequently. I would recommend at least creating both a Facebook page and a Google+ page. Facebook has a lot of traffic and can easily be linked to your website. Google also gives priority to websites or businesses with a Google+ page. There are many more that you can pursue, but I would work on getting those set up and some relevant content on them first.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a pretty cool feature that allows you to view and manage many different aspects of your online business presence specifically for Google. You can view and edit your Google+ page, manage reviews, and even view insights. This gives you the ability to take control of how your business appears in search results and it helps to both improve your search rankings and get traffic to your website.
You might also consider adding your business information to Bing Places and Yahoo Places.
Search Engine Optimization on Your Website
There are several free quality WordPress plugins that will assist you in optimizing your website for search engines. Many of them are not hard to use.
This is not an exhaustive list, but I hope it gives you and/or your business a place to start with growing your online presence and generating more traffic to your website. Riney Technology would also be happy to help you with any of the above information.