If you are looking to drive more traffic to your site, you need to work on your search engine optimization (SEO). It has been estimated that at least 93% of all internet experiences begin with a search engine search. Moreover, most people (75%) never scroll past the first page of the search results. Therefore, it is really important to get your site up into that first page and as high up on that page as possible. It is very important that your web development team keep this in mind as they design and maintain your site.
- Find the right keywords. That may seen obvious but it is really the most important thing. The way to do that is to discover what your visitors are searching for and what your focus is. If you are a dental office you want to find out what prospective dental patients are searching for as they look for when they are trying to find a dental office. Luckily, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you with that. Many web design companies use tools such as Google Keyword Planner. This free tool can help you research different keyword and keyword phrases.
- Content is still “king.” You need your content to be the best it can be. It does not matter what kind of content you are writing, it all needs to be good. In this area, you do need to include your keywords in the mix but your content should still be well written. It should be free of grammatical and spelling errors. These things will reflect poorly on your and your company. Keep in mind that nearly half of all consumers rate a company’s credibility on their website design. Having poorly written content can really hurt you.
- Look into what your competition is doing. If you do not want them to see what you are doing, something that makes a lot of sense, you can do it quietly. Most browsers allow you to browse privately so your competition will not see what you have been up. Look at what their web development teams are doing. What are they doing better than you and what can you learn from that?
- Put your keywords where they count. This means your keywords need to be in your page title, header, the URL, etc. People always think to tell their web development team to put it in the content but you should not stop there. You need to put the keywords all over your content. Most people may start looking at websites by skimming your content. That means you should put your keywords in your headers and sub-headers. This will help search engines find where in your content your keywords are.
- Think about how you name your images. Images are important. Remember, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” That may be true but search engines cannot index images. They need text. You can still use them to advance your SEO efforts. Name your images with your keywords. Use your keywords in the captions. This way when search engine spiders head over the internet, they will find your website. This is an important part of your site, say web design services company.
- Link back to yourself. You need to link back to your older content. Your web development team should work to make sure your older content still looks good. Some of it may need some editing but this is a good way to keep people on your site and give them a reason to stay and look around. Say you are veterinarian’s office, if you write a blog post about scratching posts for cats, you might want to include a link to another post you had written about cat claw health. Just make sure that cat claw health post is still relevant.
- Get other sites to link to you. External links are important for your SEO strategy. Partnerships with other websites can do a lot. This is like a third party validation. You think what you do and sell is great but when other people do both search engines and consumers will take you more seriously, say website design company experts.
These seven tips can significantly drive up your web traffic.