There are many ways to increase visitor traffic to your website and there are many ways to convert it.
In Part I we will talk about probably most popular (because it is usually free), yet time consuming way to increase traffic to your website – Search Engine Optimization
This post is going to explain how to get your website ranked high with search engines, what the necessities are in order to get indexed quickly, and how to take advantage of great free and paid tools that will help you climb the ranks!
Search Engine Optimization – right to the point
What is SEO? (search engine optimization).
SEO is a very HOT topic right now and will most likely be for a long time. Why? Because many online businesses are making millions without having to spend money on advertising, instead they are taking advantage of the search engines algorithms and creating their website to get listed on page one of search results without breaching any rules, simply bending them 🙂
Organic (meaning natural/not bought) traffic is very difficult to acquire in large volumes.
Setting up your pages to continuously get picked up by search engines is not simple, and natural organic search engine optimization can guarantee you a top 10 listing for your keyphrase for a long period of time. Don’t let SEO companies tell you otherwise. While many may indeed be able to assist in optimizing your pages, getting to the top 10 in a competitive market is extremely challenging!
So How do I get this organic traffic?
Great question! If you go to a popular site, and right click on the page, and choose ‘view source’, you will see the source code for the whole page.
If you look at the very beginning of the code, chances are you will see META tags. These tags are one of the most important elements search engines look for when spidering new content on the web.
You don’t need to understand code or web design for this. You simply copy and paste META tags, and replace the tags’ content/text with your own.
So if you’re making a website about cooking, these tags should be filled with specific cooking search terms and phrases that you know consumers will use to search i.e. cooking chinese food, how to cook a turkey, cooking classes in california, etc.
Always do some research to see what your competitors have within their meta tags, this will help you formulate your own keywords, description, title and text on your page.
TIP: The best tool you can possibly use to find the best keyword phrases for your website/pages is Google Keyword Tool.
Ahead is a compilation of actions that one needs to follow with any page(s) on a website or any landing page you currently use – and that you may want to include in your SEO report template.
Take Action
Assuming you have a keyword list, and have chosen your top 1-2 search terms you are targeting. Please follow each step closely and apply it to your page.
- Title your title! I think the most important aspect in SEO is the TITLE of your page. Utilize 5-6 of your keywords or 1-2 phrases in a few creative ways, making sure that your most important or niche search phrase is the first word(s). Hopefully you managed to get a domain name that also uses your targeted words.
- Keywords & Description: Make sure your keywords are dense with relative use of variations. Repeat your title keywords/phrases to match wherever possible within both keywords and description.
- The first text ON the page should also be creative use of your keywords and title text, using H1 and H2 some seem to have some affect as well.
- Alt-Tags are also important on your images, again repeating variations of your keywords/phrases. For those that don’t understand this, when you roll over an image or text, and a little yellow window pops up, this is the ‘alt tag’.
- USE KEYWORD tools, analyze your competitors, always see what they are doing differently with their pages compared to yours. USE Anchors with relevant keywords as well.
- Root folder: Remember that SE’s love files in your root directory most, and naming your pages like cooking_chinese_food.html instead of index.html or aboutus.html will also help search engines find you.
- Numero Uno: You won’t be able to be 1 for too many phrases. Focus on 3 or 4 popular keyphrases and narrow in on them.
- Backlinks from authority sites. These are sites that have been around for a long time, and have a high PR with google (more on this later in the series). A quick way to get backlinks from authority sites is to post blogs, videos, audio and articles with a link back to your .com on at least 10 authority sites using at least 3 media types (1 article, 1 video, 1 audio, etc.)
- Content Continuity: As your content is rolled out (your copy/pics), do your best to continuously repeat your keyphrases in various ways capturing all forms of your most important keywords i.e. cook, cooking, cooks, cooked, chinese food, oriental food, chow mein, chicken balls, etc.
- Insite and outbound links: If you have more than one page, use your targeted keywords as link text, linking to a page that has that same key text in the title and file name. Did I Iose you?
Ok, back to the search term – chinese food recipe – Your page talks about the best chinese food recipe ever made, halfway through the read you would read – The best ever chinese food recipe ever is available here. This link would then point to a page named chinese-food-recipe.html, and the title of that page would include ‘chinese food recipe’. See the pattern? Search engines can’t resist this. Outbound links work in the same way, however pointing to another site and not a page within yours. These are also important to have, even if it just loops them back in once they get to the outbound site (it could still be your site, on another server, just an intermission page or mini-site). - Anchors: If you know what they are, use them! Chinese food example: A part of the link reads ” To read exactly how I make my chicken balls click here, This link would link to an anchor that was named chicken-balls. Which would sit right beside H1 text also reading ‘chicken balls recipe’, and the first sentence would have ‘chicken balls’ in it.
- Always submit your new pages when you update them, if you have a tool that submits your pages to all the directories I would recommend using it once a month with all your pages. If you make small changes to your text or meta tags, spiders will indeed index you again.
Remember, there is no cheat sheet or secrets to internet marketing, there are only proven systems and deregulated tactics. The only true way to discover the best formulas is to try to combine everything you know in split tests, and be creative with competitive intelligence.
If you take the time to refine, refine, then refine some more, you will notice yourself climb the ranks and results quickly. If you have multiple pages, each should be optimized with the above same steps.
And by the way with the real-time visitor monitoring feature of LiveHelpNow help desk software you will be able to see whether your SEO efforts are producing results because you will be able to see how exactly visitors to your website are finding it in Google, all in real time.
