Ultimate Guide To Online Traffic

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can seem a daunting topic when you are new to the internet. A professional SEO can be expensive but some of the most effective fundamentals can be done for free by yourself.

I’m not saying you will become a website seo expert overnight as SEO is a broad topic, but you can effectively optimise your site and increase relevant traffic significantly by following these tips.

As the title suggests SEO is just optimising your pages to give search engines clarity about what the page is offering. Done in a ‘white hat’ manner SEO is completely approved by the search engines. But there are techniques out there that are frowned upon (black hat) that although can create short-term gains are not recommended for long-term growth of your websites.

Backlinks

The whole internet exists because of links, search engines operate by following links from site to site. Your ranking depends mainly on the number of links you have back to your site. The more the better then? Not quite, it is also important that the links are relevant to your page topic.

If your page is about ebay, a link from a site about auctions or home business is great as too are more general sites about business or shopping etc. A link from a site about boats would not be as useful as it is not relevant.

The actual ‘anchor text’ used by the linking page is also important. When you create great content that people want to link to, they will use text like ‘I found this great article about [website seo]‘ (where [ ] is the part they put the link) so search engines use this anchor text as a description of what the page is about. Links that have anchor text relating to your content are the best way to build your ranking.

Note – If you are doing this manually make sure you use many different anchor texts to each page eg ‘search engine optimisation’, ‘getting more traffic’, ‘website traffic’ etc to appear natural.

Using Keywords

Every website needs great content to be successful, but amending your content to include keywords that people are searching for generates much more traffic. Use google’s keyword tool to get an idea of the most searched terms in your niche and base your content around it.

You should then insert the keywords or phrase into your article a few times and in your headline. The general rule is 5-10% density so in an article of 500 words you should try to get it in about 10-15 times, but it may be difficult to keep it readable. Don’t stuff your keyword in loads of times, just add it casually so it doesn’t spoil the flow of your article.

You can also post unique articles to directories using the same techniques, you can then link back to your site using anchor text as above.

URLs, Domains and Meta Tags

To make your pages appear more relevant still, you should have your keywords inserted in the domain name and URLs of your site. If the site is about african baboons you should get www.africanbaboons.com. You can further SEO the url by using keywords in your file name e.g. brown-african-ground-baboons.html so it would be www.africanbaboons.com/brown-african-ground-baboons.html. Use only keywords that you have based the article around and don’t overdo it, place pages within sub-categories for ease of navigation.

In the behind-the-scenes HTML code of your site resides your meta data, you can insert your keywords in the title, description and keywords sections, don’t just stuff these with keywords as they are ultimately read by humans.

These three ideas will greatly improve your search rankings if performed regularly, I hope you will then delve further into the fascinating topic of website SEO.