3 Ways Increase Traffic using SEO

Steps to Increase Website Traffic using SEO Such a good looking website but no traffic! Sounds familiar? Improving your we...

Steps to Increase Website Traffic using SEO

The Importance of SEO

Such a good looking website but no traffic! Sounds familiar?

Improving your website's ranking (using Search Engine Optimisation) and getting onto the first page on Google can be a long, technical and tedious process, normally braved only by technical people. There are several things you can do yourself to improve your SEO!
We have spent many months researching this, invested in software, tested on websites, and now want to share some of what we learnt. Firstly, a few facts:
  • Websites have become "common" and it is estimated that there are now more than 110 million websites hosted on millions of servers throughout the world.
  • Google, Yahoo, Bing and others have developed search engines because we cannot check out all 110.000.000 websites when searching for something.
  • A search engine is a computer program that matches "people's search phrases" with the "content of known websites"
  • If your website is not found on the first or second of the results pages then it is very unlikely that the person who is searching will ever see your website.

Firstly, 3 important questions

  1. Does the website work properly and has its engine been built and optimised by a professional website builder? The code, content management system, images, upload time, links, speed, and loads of other factors can all influence how your website is ranked. Search engines do not always give good rankings to badly built websites.
  2. Does the content of the website appeal to "web-crawlers", and does the content match what people are searching for? Search engines will rank you high if your website has been optimised for certain very search-specific keywords. Remember, if you expect to be found for a particular keyword but you don't use it in your text, then you probably won't be found for it.
  3. Does your website convince or urge visitors to do something like buy your product, call your company, send you an email or make an enquiry? Or do your visitors quickly hop to another site?
    Once search engines find my website and I get traffic - Does my site convert? 

Must Read: 11 SEO Tactics Every Blogger must Know

The SEO Process In a Nutshell

The process (simplified) to increasing your website's performance is really quite simple:
  1. Know (or find out) what your customers are searching for (known as "search keywords")
  2. Alter / write your content on your website to match those keywords
  3. Wait for Google to see your changes, analyse the results, edit/tune your text, and repeat.
Of course it's not quite as easy as that, however having relevant & well-written content on your website is the most relevant factor to improving your SEO, and it is the most common thing that website owners tend to overlook. 

Key-Word Research

Q: What is a search keyword?
A: A word or phrase that people actually key into the search box when they are looking for a product. - What will my customers search for?
There is a fine balance here between too short and too long. Here are 3 examples of this:
  1. The search for "B&B" will get 1.240.000 results. The 1-word keyword B&B is too short to be of any use, and and generally not very effective.
  2. The search for "B&B Taradale" narrows the results to 10,900 which is much better and more common. Most search phrases used consist of 2, 3 or 4 keywords.
  3. The search for "B&B Taradale queen bed no kids" narrows the results to 1. This is a very targeted phrase but probably too specific.
    You have to select a good spread of 2 - 5 word Key-phrases with 3-word phrases being the most used.
Each website owner needs to be very specific about this, and brainstorm targeted keywords. Ask friends and clients, check out your competitor's website and test the keywords you come up with by doing searches and checking the results.
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Select as many different key phrases as you think fit, put them on a spreadsheet and rank these in order of importance.Allocate to each page of your website 5 of your best keywords relative to that page, then start optimizing each page with these keywords.
Trying to optimize your content without doing keyword research is like firing a gun with your eyes closed. Usually very ineffective and sometimes dangerous!

First the Landing (Home) page then the other pages.

Your landing page is the page where most of your customers will land and where you lay-out your services.
  • This page must be "the honey that attracts the bee" otherwise you will get little traffic. It mustlook superb, efficient and direct your visitors to "what you have to offer" on the other pages. The tour operator will specify that he offers walking tours, bus tours and wine tours and the B&B's landing page will lead to pages describing the rooms, breakfast menu, swimming pool etc. We must help the visitor along by linking them through to your other pages.
  • Now first optimise this landing page followed by your other pages with good text using your specific key phrases for each page. 

Optimization Tips

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Deal systematically with each of the following aspects to see results:

H1 Headings - Start your page with a H1 heading of 5-10 words.

This heading should include at least one of your major keyword(s). Use H1 only for the most important heading in your text. This is important for the human eye and the same goes for SEO, so give this a lot of thought. Don't waste your H1 heading on "Welcome to..." but use it for "Tours through Wellington Harbour for Japanese Tourists".

Subsequent headings in your text should generally be H2 & H3. Bare in mind that the more headings you have, the more "watered down" the effect of these headings become.

Other headings, bold text & italics.

Write your text with care, using the less important headings H2 → H6 for headlines and titles of sub sections. Include the keywords you are optimising the page for and use bold text and italics to draw the visitors attention to something important in the page.

Number of words and keyword density - How many words should I use on a page?

There is no hard and fast rule here, besides that "very short" content could mean that your page will look insignificant to search engines and "very long" content could mean that it is long winded and your visitor may get bored.
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Good advise here is to have a look at the competition, I mean by spying a little bit on the websites that do well with search engines. Check the word count, the use of bold text, the size, the use of italics and headings; have a special look at the Keyword density (keywords as a % of total words). These sites rank high so they must be doing something right. Do not copy their content under any circumstances as this can be easily traced with modern programs, but if the high ranking websites use between 500 and 800 words and you are only using 100 then you may want to increase your text. If their keyword density is between 2 and 5% and yours 15 then you may be overdoing it a bit. Same for bold and Italic text.

So take your queue from learning from the opposition, remembering that the text has to look natural at all times.

Links inside my website

Search engines give preference to websites where the pages are well-linked (having lots of links between them). These are called "internal links" and it is important to lead your visitor through your site with these links to the other pages. Read through your page and ask yourself "what's next?" - If your article is about "walks" then give the reader the option to select another type of walk (beach walk on a page about forest walks), link to your bookings page or to the "Choose your Guide" page. Try not to use the "click here" as the link but use one of your keywords.

"Book a forest walk here" is a better link with forest walk being a keyword.

Links to and from other websites

Search engines rank your site higher if there are other sites that link to yours (external links), especially if those website have a higher page ranking than yours. Contact your colleagues, suppliers, customers and friends and ask them to put a link on their website to yours. Remember that it should be a link from a related website to your business and not any old or dubious website. Work out how you would like to feature on your suppliers web page (many websites have a link page).

How to Create Viral Content 

Do not buy links from link-farms as it will drop your SEO ranking eventually, and may even get you banned from Google.

"Packit, a superb manufacturer of packaging products". This would be a good link because it includes the business name and the keyword 'packaging products'.

Search engines think highly of well linked websites - both internal and external. 

Get linked from well known Search Directories

There are thousands of websites all over the internet that allow you to add your business details and get a link to your website from. Unfortunately most of these websites have no actual relevance to how your website is found as they are considered not important by Google.

Describe your images

Search engines typically cannot see your images, but do read your image description ("alt tags"). Pay attention to this and put your keywords in your image description.

So if you are offering a beach walking tour and you display the image of a gorgeous looking girl who is obviously having fun on the beach, then the search engine - unfortunately - is not able to see this image but reads the image description that you have provided.

You need to be creative and descriptive here and instead of using a plain "girl on Beach" you could use:"On our guided beach walks along the Kapiti Coast we often see gorgeous girls having fun". You have covered some keywords and provided a useful description.

Meta Title - Create a great title for your page.

It is the first introduction of the Search engine to the content of your site and this title is generally displayed in the linked text of the results page. It is important to create a meaningful title for your page and you need to include your main keywords.

Example - "Decorative Wedding Cakes for Wellington Brides" - This has the keywords Wedding Cakes and Decorative in the Meta Title and specifies the area.

Meta Description - Describe what your page is all about.

This description is important for search engines so you should again include some of your keywords here. Work on this description so that it best describes what the page is all about. Humans may see this description too as it is sometimes displayed in search results.

Example - Harry's Tours in Whangarei include a Harbour visit with a 30 minute boat trip. Free transport to your accommodation in comfortable coaches. Our guides speak many languages. 

Conclusion

If you would like your website to produce good results, then it is important that you not only have a professionally built website, but that you pay special attention to the content of your pages.
It is vital that you first undertake "keyword research" and proceed with optimizing your pages for these keywords. You need to continue testing your site and see how you and your opposition in the searches are doing. Keep making smaller changes to fine-tune and update your pages fairly regularly. Search engines like "fresh content" and favour regularly updated sites.

SEO is a very fluid skill and owners of Search engines do not exactly advertise how they work out their preferences - they often change them so as to confuse those who engage in unethical practises to get to the "top spot". What will never change though is the respect a search engine has for a well written and designed website!
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SEO should be undertaken on a regular basis if you want good results from your site.
You can do this yourself (this article will have given you some useful tips) using your website's CMS, alternatively Techno Joy can provide this SEO service for you as our software can research your site very quickly and professionally. We would:
  • Select & weigh the effectiveness of keywords. Are they good or bad keywords?
  • Adapt your content to relect these keywords in a way that is "attractive" to both Google as well as potential customers.
  • Report on how individual pages have been optimized - what is my keyword density, how much bold text has been used, are the headings effective, etc.
  • Rank website and analyses performance against top competitors.
Optimization is not a "quick-fix" but a slow dedicated process and we usually do this work over a 6 month period when we are able to "measure and tune" the website whilst giving you monthly progress reports.
Recommended to You: How To Get Your First 500 Loyal Visitors #InfoGraphic

I accompany entrepreneurs and help them to build their presence on the internet efficiently and save them time! To achieve this, I use the current web marketing tools (blog, social networks, emails...). I help and train you so that you can finally give your activity a right place on the web.

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