There are a variety of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website. Today we continue our October 14 post on the best SEO techniques for building site traffic:
- Page design. Sure your site needs to be attractive and easy to navigate, but we’re not talking cosmetics here. Site pages need to be SEO friendly to encourage search engine spidering and indexing. You should be able to reach all interior pages from your homepage with no page being more than three clicks away. To encourage spidering and indexing, keep an up-to-date site map of all major pages and optimize meta tags, including title (65 characters), description (160 characters) and keywords. You’ll get more hits if you keyword match your title and URL, use targeted keywords in the title and description and add a major keyword to your domain name.
- Focus on Google. While you don’t want to neglect Yahoo! or MSN, Google is the undisputed king of the search engines. Google will drive more traffic to your site than any other search engine so focus your SEO efforts on Google. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and Analytics to polish your site and check Google Alerts to keep up with keyword and link-building tips.
- Link building. Link building is a powerful way to build site traffic. Just remember that’s it’s a two-way street. What you link to will reflect upon your site so make sure you only link to high quality, highly ranked sites that have a high degree of relevancy to your own site. Ideally, anchor text (the words in the underlined/clickable link) should reiterate your keywords, as should linked titles and content.
- Article marketing. Submitting informative articles to article distribution sites is an effective way to lure traffic to your site and create important backlinks. Articles can be short (500-700 words) or longer (800-1,000 words) and should expand on or relate to content found on your site. You can’t just chop out a section of your site content and submit to an article site. A certain amount of unique content is required. Also, while it’s important to keep in mind the marketing purpose of articles – to bring in customers and sell products or services — they should not be blatant advertisements.
- Create traffic hubs. Organizing your site around several well-defined traffic hubs can augment search engine spidering and indexing. By dividing your site into sections, or hubs, that each focus on a different major topic, you can create multiple groups of keyword-rich pages by further dividing the topic into more specific subgroups, thus increasing search engine indexing opportunities.
