It is not quite possible to lead high traffic to your website by just posting contents without doing any SEO, marketing and other promotional work. This is because there are simply so many websites out there with similar, if not better, contents.
However, you can breathe a sigh of relief as the volume of online traffic you get does not depend on the quality of your articles alone; you can still lead traffic to your website with some good SEO techniques.
So how is it possible to be at the top of a Google search above your competitors?
1. Use keywords right
Keywords are always the major contributor for website traffic. First, choose the ‘right’ keywords – the ones which you want to identify your site or post with. When people perform a search using those keywords, your site should appear among the search engine results. Next, use these keywords in your post title, tags, image filenames and of course, within your article. Use them sparingly so as not to cause over-stuffing of keywords, which will lead to your website being considered as spam by Google.
2. Use less images and Flash
You’d know by now that keywords are important and that search engine spiders crawl over the website to search for text contents. Anything that isn’t text such as Flash or images will be disregarded, therefore they play no part or very insignificant role in pulling in organic website traffic.
But of course, what is a website with just text? You can still include images but must make sure that you label your images properly through the ALT tags. Images are good for the human readers because they will make your website more interesting to read.
3. Internal links
Have you ever wondered how Wikipedia appears at the top of a lot of search engine result? It has something to do with the fact that there are numerous related internal links contained within the article. You can definitely picture the many links within a sentence that will take you to the page explaining the definitions in further detail. Try doing something similar within your article by creating links to related posts which you think your readers would want to read.
4. Get external links
It has been found that websites which are linked to in other websites are favored by Google and Yahoo! Search engines. So if you belong to a bloggers’ circle or have a network of people within the industry, use those connections to get others to link your website from theirs. This is one reason why networking is important among website owners. However, don’t just connect with any Tom, Dick or Harry as the reputation of the linking website is important too!
You certainly do not wish to get any backlinks from a gambling website for instance. Links from such websites will do more harm than benefiting you in any way!
5. Make a sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs of a website. Whenever the webmaster submits this sitemap to search engines, the search engines are able to locate the website in a faster and better way as the list contains an ‘overview’ of what the site contains.
If you are on WordPress, you can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to automatically generate a sitemap and submit it Google. This plugin is FREE!
6. Choose a good domain
You would think that people would select a domain that is easy to remember and pronounce but there are handfuls that comes up with domain names full of noises such as hyphens and numbers. It is not only difficult for people to remember and reach at your website but these sites are not SEO-friendly either.
Take my own website for example, what do you think of it – 100Webhosting.com? Is it difficult to pronounce?
7. Know your traffic
How can you reach out to your audience if you don’t know where they came from? By knowing which sites or sources lead the most traffic to your site, you can intensify marketing efforts on those sites.
If you are on WordPress, you can simply use the Jetpack Lite plugin to give you some insights on who are your referrers and what search engine terms/phrases were being used to reach your website.
8. Know SEO like the back of your hand
What better way to implement SEO techniques than to know as much as you can about it, and then put your knowledge to use? There is just so much to learn about SEO and more and more ways to improve your visibility are popping up every now and then, so keep up to date and be patient in learning up the tips and tricks of the trade.
Getting your website on the first page of a search engine’s results usually takes a combination of many methods, and may vary on different websites. However, it isn’t impossible to get there if you know how. So, I hope that by using the tips above, you can be sure to be a step ahead of your competitors.
Image Credit: Minilibra
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