10 Strategies for Driving Traffic to your Website
There’s no point in pursuing an online business venture unless you’re prepared to take the necessary steps to drive relevant traffic to your web site. By increasing awareness and pertinent traffic to your web pages through the search engines, you enhance your potential return on investment—the more relevant the traffic, the greater the chance for client conversations. But in order for this to happen, you need to follow a set of core principles. The intent of this article is to provide some essential tips for driving traffic to your online property, by increasing your ranking in the search engines. Without further adieu, here are ten important methods you should consider.
Know Your Audience
Establish who your audience is when creating and maintaining your site—this is a vital strategic step for driving traffic to your pages. Not only will you increase your chances for ongoing success, you will avoid having to spend extra dollars revamping your website when your initial attempt fails.
Design It Well
There’s nothing more frustrating than visiting a web page with a poor layout. Easy to navigate pages with appealing design will augment your site’s stickiness level, increasing your chances of maintaining repeat visitors. Believe it or not, poor navigation also hampers the search engines from properly indexing pages, since most algorithms are designed to view pages as human beings do.
You should avoid creating graphically intense pages. Remember, a lot of folks are still using slow connections — a page with intense graphical content takes time to load, and this will frustrate those without the time or patience to wait. Finally, make certain your pages work under all current browser types and versions. Your source code should abide by the current standard across all popular browsers.
Organic Optimization over Pay-for-Services
Your marketing dollars should target an organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy above a pay-for-strategy. Pay-for-strategies include pay-for-inclusion and pay-per-click. With pay-for-inclusion, your site is guaranteed to be listed in a search engine or directory database, but unless optimized properly, it will not necessarily rank well within the search results. With pay-per-click, your site’s position is predetermined by a bid amount; the higher the bid, the higher the placement. Whenever a user clicks through to your site from the search results, you pay the bid cost.
The problem with these strategies is you end up gambling with your return on investment. Fees add up, and you have no way of judging whether or not the traffic coming to your site is relevant. Furthermore, you have to pay the engines and directories separately for these services. That’s not to say that pay-for-services are unnecessary; they do have their place in the realm of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). For instance, if you’ve done everything right by optimizing for organic searches, but your site is not performing up to your expectations within certain engines or directories, you can give it a boost with a pay-for-strategy.
Optimizing your site through SEO offers the best potential return on investment. With a strong SEO service, your site is tuned for relevant content, listed organically, and maintained on a regular basis for maximum exposure over the long term. The traffic driven to your site is made up of ‘true customers’ seeking your products and services. Furthermore, once your site is optimized and maintained by SEO, ongoing traffic is free.
Content Relevancy
The Internet is growing at a phenomenal rate. This makes it increasingly difficult for indexes and directories to maintain organized databases. At one time web site designers could get away with ‘keyword stuffing,’ by filling meta tags with irrelevant popular keywords so their sites would fool the search engines and be listed under irrelevant categories. Search engine algorithms no longer allow this to happen. Instead, the engines deeply favor sites that maintain relevant content. This is part of the SEO plan—to tune your website with relevant content so it ranks well within the engines.
Perhaps the most important element is the title tag, which should contain relevant keywords; this alone will give your pages a significant lift within the rankings. Your site should also have a relevant description and keywords tag.
Prominence and Density
Prominence and density are two important factors linked with relevancy that the engines analyze to determine how well your site will rank. The closeness level of your keywords and phrases to the top of a document is referred to as prominence. This is measured as a percentage. Keeping relevant keywords and phrases within the top portion of your content is ideal; your prominence should be at least 60 percent or more.
Density refers to the percentage a keyword or phrase repeats itself within a page. Ideally, density should be between two and five percent. There’s no solid rule on this one, just a rule of thumb. But you should never go above seven percent. If you do, the search engines may penalize the offending page.
Link It Up
Internal links are important for spiders to find and index the documents contained on a site. It’s a very good idea to have a search map page on your site listing all of your page links; this makes it easy for spiders to find and index all of your pages from one location. Also make certain you have no broken links, since spiders will not index dead ends.
Search engines give a lot of weight to sitesthat provide outbound and back links. Once again, these links must be relevant. Placing links to and from a site not related to your content or theme is frowned upon. In other words, if you operate a camera shop site, you should provide outbound links to sites that deal with information regarding cameras, and vice versa with inbound links. By doing so, you will increase your ranking potential within the engines, and a better ranking means increased traffic.
Keep It Fresh
Update your pages with new relevant content in order to prevent your site from stagnating and moving down in rank. The problem is it generally takes new pages several months to show up in the search engines. One way around this is to add dynamic content to your site through a blog. Blogs operate under RSS (really simple syndication), which is dynamic. Blog friendly engines will index this dynamic content within a short period of time.
Avoid Repetition
Search engines are cracking down on redundancy by penalizing sites that promote duplicated content. Gone are the days when syndicated articles could be passed around and posted to different sites. Avoid repeating blocks of content across your pages and do not maintain content already found on other sites. If you do, your pages may be penalized and removed from the search engines’ indexes. Mirrored pages are also a no-no.
Monitor Your Traffic
Successful marketers always keep an eye on the performance levels of their advertisements. If not, they have no way of measuring success, and this is a huge gamble. Monitoring your web traffic is no different. Keep an eye on your traffic levels by analyzing your statistics reports. By doing so, you can see and judge where your site is doing well and where it needs improvement.
Obey the Rules
The Internet is still in its infancy; therefore the rules and regulations are constantly being changed by those who define its working structure, i.e., the search engines.
By remaining informed and up-to-date on the current rules and regulations implemented by the search engines, you already have part of the recipe for online success.
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