You’ve built a beautiful website, everything seems to be working fine now you are searching for the digital Holy Grail – how to increase traffic.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) deals exclusively with issue and works to increase traffic to your website.
How to increase traffic – SEO demystified
SEO encompasses both on-site and off-site processes all working together to drive high traffic to your site.
On-site you should consider the following website issues to increase traffic:-
- Are your meta tags working for you? Increase traffic by ensuring they are search engine friendly. How? Check that your title tag has the relevant keywords. Check that you images have the correct ALT tags that describe the images and if relevant use keywords.
- Avoid any black hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO uses unscrupulous SEO techniques such as placing keywords in text that hides against the background colour. Avoid any unethical SEO techniques, these may initially increase traffic but in the long-term your traffic will drop as search engines are astute enough to cotton on to these techniques.
- Content is King. Make sure you write excellent copy surrounding your products, company and services. Search engines love content as do visitors, write good content to increase traffic. Seed content with just the right level of keywords – too dense and you’ll get penalised for spam and too little and it doesn’t have the desired effect.
- Move away “vanity” keywords. Fighting for the exclusive right to highly competitive keywords is hard. Research also shows that internet users are also using longer keyword search queries. Long tail SEO is an excellent way to increase traffic. How? Take an example “gap clothing”. If you stuck to that you would be competing against a known brand that has market dominance. If you targeted longer or alternative keywords such as gap clothes, gap womenswear, gap women’s designer clothing, gap children clothing etc you are then going to appear for longer and less competitive keywords.
- Social media optimistaion (SMO) – okay a little different to SEO but has the same objective as SEO. Look to incorporate social media bookmarking, if one visitor likes it and then shares it with others then traffic will naturally increase.
Off-site SEO will look to see how search engines rank you and how many inbound links they have found to your site. Increase your traffic by considering:-
- Link building. Find quality over quantity sites that are willing to provide links to your sites. Inbound links are a great tool to increase traffic. Search engine value these, they take the approach that if one site links to another then there is a value that needs rewarding. Quality is key, look for sites that have high pagerank and relevance is hugely important. Search engines again sniff out sites that have little relevance to one another as they strive to improve user’s experience.
Overwhelmed?
SEO, if done well, is a natural way to increase traffic. Never expect any overnight miracles as all processes take some time to mature. SEO’ers that promise immediate results are misleading.
This article has touched upon some of the key ways to increase traffic. There are loads of other ways which we happily share in other posts on this website. Small articles are better as they allow people to digest action plans.
We’d love to hear from you and be able to discuss how we can increase traffic to your site.
Contact us now or call 0845 555 5040 for a chat about how we can help.
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