Search Engine Optimization - 10 Ways To Increase Visitors To Your Website

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So you have a nice web site, but it's just not attracting visitors. Follow the ten steps below and just watch as your visitor numbers explode.

No.1

Research, research, research..

Find out what keywords people are using to search for your goods or services. There are lots of free online tools to help you with this - Google Keyword Tool is one of these.

In general, don't go for broad keywords like Books Lighting or Cars as the competition is greater and the visitors may not be interested in what you are offering. Better to be more specific like Children's books online Online lighting store or vintage cars hire. You will rank higher for these searches and your visitors will find your site relevant.

No. 2

Place appropriate keywords throughout every area of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms - how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?

The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords

However putting too high a proportion of keywords on your site could get ...
... you labeled as a spammer, and search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of keyword-stuffing. Be strategic in your keyword use.

No.3

Adding a site map to your site - a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site - make it easier for the search engine spiders to search and index your site. It should mean that most or all of your pages are listed in the search index.

No.4

Make your URL search engine friendly. Using a client of ours, I will show a good example of a search engine friendly URL.

The client Fair brothers Formal Wear is in the business of suit hire, with a focus on wedding suit hire. Major keywords here are Suit, Hire, and Wedding. So a search engine friendly URL used for the Wedding Suit Hire page on their site is http://fairbrothersweddingsuithire.ie/suit-hire-collection/wedding-suit-hire

No.5

Search engine spiders can only search text. They do not read text in images.
That's why it's essential that you add ALT tags to your images. ALT tags allow you to include keyword-rich descriptions for all images on your site and this is read by the search engine spiders.
The visible text around your images is also valuable for SEO. Add captions to all your pictures and be descriptive with the text in immediate proximity to your images.

No.6

Your content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.
The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are sites that regularly updated with useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline.

One way to ensure that your site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog like this one! An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.

No.7

A blog is just one element of social media distribution, an important SEO strategy. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.

So when you complete your latest blog posting, get it out there. Tweet if you followers on twitter, post it to your face book friend's, let your contacts know about it on Linked in..

Once it's out there, watch as its re tweeted, recommended ,forwarded, shared etc. The distribution power of social media really is amazing. And you get a whole lot of back links to your site!

No.8

An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites.
Lots of sites have link pages, where other relevant non competing companies are listed. Personally ask the webmasters of well-respected sites if they'll include a link to your site on theirs. Be sure to return the favor — then everyone wins!

Do a little prep work and check the page rank of the site before asking. Links with high ranking sites will really make an impact, where as low ranking sites will make little difference or may actually impact negatively on your traffic.

No.9

Flash websites do not allow a site to be well optimized. The spiders do not read the text, the URL is static and not optimistic etc. We would recommend that full flash website should only be used in a small number of cases.

If you want the benefits of Flash, without losing the capability of optimizing your website, we would recommend that you incorporate flash element within a standard website, as we have done on our site www.themarketingpod.ie

No.10

Track the results and use this feedback to improve future SEO strategy.

With free analysis tools like Google Analytics, you can track the increases in visitors to your site, see how the visitors are finding your site, what pages they are reading, how long they are staying etc You can even drill down to see what keywords delivered the visitor to your site and how long they stayed and whether that completed a goal that you may have set.

This information can be used to inform and update your SEO strategy. Concentrating on what is working and what is not!

If you need any help with any of the above, The Marketing Pod's experienced Search Engine Optimization team would be delighted to help. Just give us a buzz!