The purpose of starting a website is provide useful information for your customers and also get traffic to help you increase your customer base and improve your revenues.
While there are several ways to direct traffic to your website, optimizing your website for search engines is one of the cheapest ways to do it since being an organic method, it has better conversion rates that other marketing methods like paid campaigns. Better yet, it’s absolutely free if you master the needful SEO strategies you need to rank your website better with search engines.
Here are tips to get more search engine traffic.
Keyword research
You need to know the string of words your target audience use when they look up things on search engines. This will guide you into the relevant keywords you need to use in your content. You search traffic depends on how relevant your keywords are to what people are looking for.
Your keywords should be a blend of short-tail words and long-tail keys that are most used but also including low competition keywords that only a few people use.
Optimize the keywords
After finding the relevant keywords, you should find a way to use them in your page titles and content headings. This makes it easier for search engine crawlers to index your content using the appropriate keyword giving you a better ranking in the results page of every relevant keyword.
It is also important to have a URL that captures the keywords. This means that your title should form part of the URL as opposed to the posting date.
This is because search engine algorithms place more importance to keywords used in the titles and headings than those in the body text. Not that you shouldn’t use keywords in the rest of your content.
Also, use keywords in your subheadings which again attracts the attention of search engine crawlers as well as making your content much easier to read for your audience.
Keyword Density
You need be careful of how much keywords you have in a single posy. Excessive use of keywords not only makes your page unreadable and lowers the quality of your content but also may be penalized by search engines for spamming which beat the whole purpose of SEO altogether. Aim for a keyword density of 3-5% to get the best ranking.
Meta Descriptions
Although meta descriptions don’t impact your SEO ranking, they help entice a visitor to click on your URL by giving a hint of what to expect should they visit your website.
If you have images on your website, use keywords to describe your images. This further helps optimize your content for search engines which don’t read images but the alternative text used to describe them. The same applies to videos which you also need to use relevant tags in their description.
Paid search traffic
You can pay to have your website listed at the top of search engine results page just before the organic results are listed. This is an effective way to gain visibility for your business, beat your competitors and direct traffic to your website.
You will need an Ad Watcher to ensure that you avoid click fraud from your competitors and search engine partners.
Responsive design
The loading time for your website impacts your SEO since search engines like Google penalize sites that take forever to load. More importantly, your website should be mobile-friendly since more people are increasingly using their smartphones to access the web.
