With some estimates at more than 2 billion for the number of websites on the Internet, it is vital to optimize web traffic to your website to ensure its success. Optimizing web traffic simply means maximizing the amount of traffic from the search engines to your site, commonly known as search engine optimization (SEO). If potential customers and clients are not finding you, then they are finding your competitors instead. One of the truths about online consumers is that over 85% of them use search engine results to find what they need, which means your website ideally should be ranked in the top 10 search results.
Instructions
- 1
Design the format of your website for maximum search engine optimization. A clean simplistic design and a clearly defined topic or niche will ensure SEO friendliness. Search engines prefer to see more text on a website; avoid the use of too many images. Be sure to include keywords (words that define the content of a page) in titles and headings; create site maps to help visitors navigate your site; and include keyword-rich content throughout the website. Make sure the content of the website is useful to visitors by informing, teaching or otherwise enlightening them about the particular topic of interest.
2Write the content of your website including all information you want visitors to know about you, your brand and your business. Once you are satisfied with the content, pick out the "keywords," or words and phrases from your website which best describe the content of your site. These words and phrases should be the keywords visitors will be most likely to enter in the search box when looking for a site like yours.
3Submit your website to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing (formerly MSN). Each of the search engines has a webpage where you can submit your website URL (Internet address) to the particular search engine. For Google this page can be found at www.google.com/addurl/. The search engines will then index your site which means they will define and organize the content of the website in their database in order to begin the ranking process.
4Include your keywords and keyword phrases in the title of each page of your website. It is also beneficial for search engine optimization to include the keywords in the first and last paragraphs of content on each webpage. Sites such as NicheBotClassic.com and WordTracker.com offer free keyword research tools to help you find the most effective keywords for your website. Keywords are critical for optimizing web traffic.
5Obtain links from other websites that bring visitors to your site. After content and theme congruency (consistent and clearly defined topic or niche) are achieved, links to your website from other quality websites is an important factor as all search engines will be using to determine your site's ranking. To get your links on other sites you can contact the owners of the sites and offer to do a link exchange-"you put my link on your site and I will put yours on mine"-or simply ask if it would be alright to add your link to their sites.
6Promote your website. Search engines are not the only way people can find your website. Traditional advertising methods such as TV and radio, word-of-mouth, press releases on and offline, web directories and social media platforms are all effective methods for promoting your website to optimize web traffic.
7Create internal links on your website. Internal links are simply links on your web pages that direct visitors to another page or portion of your site when clicked. A site map is like the table of contents for your site and is an effective way to create internal links.
