In one aspect, your website is like your favourite coffee house: they both need traffic in order to survive and prosper. As to the brick-and-mortar java hangout, their main key to success is location, location, location. Fronting on a side street four blocks from the main boulevard and out of walking range from offices and stores would be their death knell because of the monthly expenses of rent, utilities and labour.
Once you’ve paid for the initial expense of creating and launching your website, however, it can run along in neutral for months on end with only a minimum server fee due each month. In too many cases, this is exactly what happens. Effort, time and money is expended to launch a website, but no one follows up to maximize its usage as a traffic generator.
Here are 6 great ways to improve your website ranking in order to drive more traffic your way.
1. Use Keywords Strategically
Researching and using keywords that can lead visitors to your specific site as opposed to competing websites is paramount in creating an effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign to drive more traffic your way. For example, the word “cowhide rugs” is vague and generalized. If you are an interior decorating firm or a cowhide rug manufacturer, you’ll want to be more specific and use keyword phrases like “cowhide rugs look great on wood and stone floors” and “best quality rugs and pillows make of cowhide.” These phrases will more likely draw people actually interested in buying your products than simply attracting the curious cowboy crowd.
Take into account how you personally search for things on the Internet when selecting your keywords. However, don’t rely on your initial research for keyword insertions. Your research should be ongoing. Publish as much Internet content as you can in order to capture additional keywords to draw more visitors and increase your conversion rates.
2 Maintain Originality
Copying existing text from other URLs should always be avoided. Why? Because you might be a target for a copyright infringement suit by stealing someone else’s work product, for one. More importantly, as for trying to increase your SEO ranking and thereby increase traffic, it might have the opposite effect and even ruin your website’s search rankings.
3. Optimize Loading Speed
Search-engines weight your website’s load speed as a factor in their search-engine rankings. And slow load-speeds affect your rates of converting visitors to customers. Studies have shown that 40 percent of website traffic will lose interest in what you have to offer and move on if it takes more than 3 seconds to load a page of content
In order to check your load speed, technical tools like Pingdom are available to give you a breakdown of how long it takes to load each element. Once you know this, and load speed needs to improve, you can look at the images or coding that are causing the problem and made modifications and improvements.
4. Use Natural-sounding Text
Word stuffing where keyword density was more important than the information being presented is a thing of the past. Search engines are more sophisticated today. They can recognize word stuffing and they act accordingly which means your ranking can actually be lowered.
Focus on creating content that your readers will find valuable. If a sentence sounds unnatural, reconstruct it. Create information that is interesting. The goal should be to publish content that is usable and enhances the visitor’s experience. Any content change that makes that happen is worth the effort.
5. Utilize Metadata
Each page of a website contains a space between the <head> tags to insert metadata, or information about the contents of each page
Title Metadata defines the page title that is seen at the top of the browser window. This is the most important metadata on the page because it directs the browser-user directly to your website. There are automated systems available that create the meta title for each webpage.
Description Metadata is the text description that browser use to find your pages. Interesting text makes for an invitation to encourage visitors to enter your website.
Keyword Metadata are search phrases that people will use when looking for your title page. You can use a wide variety of phrases, but don’t overdo it. A browser may completely ignore your offered metadata if your list becomes too excessive. Generally, 6-8 phrases is the norm. From 1-4 words should be the length.
6. Publish Relevant Content And Update Constantly
Studies have shown that the number one driver to increase your search engine rankings is quality content. Well-written, interesting content has no substitute. It’s been proven over and over again that text written specifically for your targeted user increases website traffic in the long run, The increased traffic not only brings more business to your site but it also validates its relevance and authoritative voice.
You should select and use a keyword phrase for each page. For instance, use “heli-skiing at Mt. Whistler” to define its page on a British Columbia skiing website and repeat it exactly several times throughout the page in a natural flow of words within sentences and again in the opening and closing paragraphs.
Remember to use italics, bold, heading tags and other emphasis tools to call attention to the subjects in an organized fashion. Don’t USE ALL BOLD LETTER like this to excess, however. The overuse of emphasis tags tends to make them irrelevant.
Once again, never sacrifice writing excellence for Search Engine Optimization. Write for the end user, the human at the keyboard, not for the impersonal search engine. Just as important, continually update your text content on a regular basis. Keep your content fresh and relevant.
Conclusion
There are numerous additional methods and techniques available to improve SEO rankings, of course, but the 6 great ways to improve your website ranking presented above help generate faster improvements with a minimum of financial outlay and manpower. Before throwing up your hands in despair about the lack of traffic on you website and hiring an expensive SEO company or professional to fix your problem, give these suggested fixes a try.