Optimizing traffic to your site requires a combination of strategy and artistry. Here are some tips to help get you to the top of the search engine results, and stay there.
1. Harness the power of original, quality content.
When your site contains fresh, abundant content, not only does it give potential customers more reasons to visit, it also provides plenty of opportunities for you to use those crucially important keywords. (See #3.) Just be sure to keep each page of content to one or two subjects or keyword phrases for best optimization.
Blog posts, articles, news announcements, item descriptions and reviews will not only beef up your site and make it more interesting, but they can potentially be linked to from other sites and social media, which is another essential factor when considering SEO. Don’t forget to include plenty of outbound links from your own content, as well.
2. Keep your site in good working order.
It’s important to check your site regularly to make sure everything is working like it should. It’s the little things that can make or break a site’s popularity. A website needs to be tended regularly if it is going to flourish. If customers notice that your links are broken, or that your text contains typos or spelling errors, it’s likely that they will abandon the site and look somewhere else.
One especially important area of your site that should not be overlooked is your contact information. This link should be easily visible and accessible, and the information should be current. If customers get the impression that they can’t easily contact you, they may think they are dealing with a company that is untrustworthy.
3. Know what your keywords are, and make sure you use them strategically.
Great content is most useful for generating traffic when it’s been optimized for SEO through well chosen keywords. In order to do that, you need to know how your site ranks currently for certain keywords. There are many online tools to use for this, such as https://serps.com/.
Once you know where you stand, you can begin to refine the keywords that you want to use in your content to gradually improve your search ranking.
4. Remember that your customers are humans.
As important as it is to incorporate keywords and links into your site’s content, do remember that it’s other people who will be visiting your site, not the Google bots. Your keywords really only need to appear in the first paragraph or two.
You are ultimately trying to make a connection with other human beings, and that connection is going to be what will convert readers into customers. So the goal should be to strive for content that’s readable, relatable, and intriguing. So try to avoid peppering your copy with keywords.
5. Never underestimate the power of good design.
Consumers these days are looking for an experience, not just information. A great site incorporates all sorts of great creative design within a well-chosen format. Many people prefer visual aids to plain text, so don’t hesitate to include infographics and video within the content of your site as well.
Another thing to consider is that a growing majority of people are accessing websites through their mobile devices rather than on their computers, so it’s essential that your site should be mobile friendly.
Conclusion
It takes lots of thoughtful attention and strategy to have an active, popular site that ranks high in the search results. But if you begin with some of these small changes and build on them, eventually you will see big results.
