|
How do I get more traffic from search engines? |
|
|
|
Search engine positioning is a long-term strategy, and there are no quick-fix solutions in this area. To be really effective with search engine marketing, your site needs to be focused around the right keywords and keyword phrases. If you want to boost your traffic quickly, I would suggest checking out Google AdWords or other paid advertisement options. That said, these are the steps that would need to happen to really make it work:
Research and decide on the best keywords to aim for, ones that people use to search for what you are offering. The site that is best for this is the Pixelfast Overture Tool. You can see how many people search for a phrase on the right and what people bid for a term on the left. Ideally you find a term that is searched for a good amount, but is not bid on overly much, or the market will be oversaturated. You can try a number of different keywords to get an idea of the market. You will also want to search for the phrase on Google to see what your competition is for optimizing for that keyword. If you search for blue widgets and the first 10 results have that exact phrase in the title, that the phrase is over-optimized. If most of the results just have those keywords in the content somewhere, then you've got a winner (as long as people do search for that phrase). Don't despair if you can't find a phrase for your site that is both searched for and not over-optimized. Just choose a few good ones and start optimizing - you can still use them, you'll just have to work a bit harder. Create pages that are focused on each particular keyword phrase. For instance if your keyword phrase was blue widgets, you would want to create a page that is called "Blue Widgets". The page would be about blue widgets and include the keyword phrase a few times in the copy (but don't overdo it). You would create a page like this for each of the keyword phrases you were targeting, and add these pages to the site. Within your page, make sure your keyword phrase is in the title tag in the header, and in an H1 header tag as well. Get incoming links using the keyword text. A great way to do this is to exchange links with other sites in related fields and request that they link to you with the keywords in the link text. For instance you could ask them to link to your "Blue Widgets" page by creating the link with the text "Blue Widgets" as the linked text (the clickable, underlined text). In exchange you would have a page on your site called Partners or Resources and you would link to their site. You should also pursue "widget" directories where you can submit your link (these often require link-backs too) and/or paid directories where they link to your site for a fee. Each link to your page counts as a "vote" for your page. Links with text that matches your keyword phrase for that page count more. These "votes" add up to PageRank, which Google uses predominantly to establish the rank of your page on the search engine results. Along the same lines, be sure to use text links within your site to link to the various pages you've created. Wait and refine. Search engine positioning takes time. And do some research to learn more about what you can do to optimize your site - Webmaster World is a good start. |