I’m often asked how to increase website traffic using some quick and easy tips. Keeping up with the latest in social media and search engine optimization (SEO) can be overwhelming, but even a novice can make some quick tweaks to make sure that your website is fully optimized to help improve your rankings on search engines, as well as increase your visibility on social media.
Here are ten simple tweaks to massively increase website traffic:
1. Meta tags on each page and post. While meta tags aren’t a “quick fix” that will catapult you to the top of search engine rankings, they can be helpful if they are used correctly. Meta tags are page data tags that use HTML to tell browsers specific information about a page. While text isn’t necessary, it does explain the function of the page in a language the browser can understand.
Here is an example:
<head>
<title>Donna Gunter, Microbusiness Marketing Specialist </title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Microbusiness marketing specialist Donna Gunter helps small business owners rejuvenate their small business marketing with innovatve ideas and strategies positioning them for massive growth. “>
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=UTF-8″>
</head>
Using the meta tags correctly will play an important role in the visibility of your site to help both the reader and the search engines understand what each page and post is about.
2. Alt text for your images
The next important part of the algorithm is to effectively optimize your images. Images can help increase your traffic, but only if they aren’t ignored. Alt tags also require HTML in order for search engine spiders to read what is present. For example:
<img src=”small-business-marketing.jpg” alt=small business marketing” />
Taking the time to do this for every picture can result in huge amounts of traffic, especially if your alt image tags contain your keywords.
3. Keyword-rich page names as permalinks
While permalinks are automatically generated for your website for your page names, the permalinks won’t help unless they have been optimized. The original permalinks struture can look quite ugly: “example.com/?p=11″. Pretty permalinks like this “donnagunter.com/10-tweaks-to-increase-website-traffic″ rewrite your access file to allow you to change a string of numbers and symbols into the name of your post. When that post contains keywords that help search engines identify the content, more traffic is driven to your site.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an SEO information site that gives you a rather detailed yet complicated report of a number of metrics. From the number of clicks that your page receives and how many times it shows up in searches, it can be a very powerful tool if you know how to use it. Make sure that Google Analytics is installed on your site and is set up to provide regular email reports on how your site is performing.
5. Site Map
Think of your site map as the key to usability, not just for customers but also for search engines. Site maps can be done in HTML and XML to target both humans and search engine spiders. In addition, your site map gives you more links to all of your pages, which can help rankings as well. Google XML Sitemap is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that will create just the kind of sitemaps you need to bring attention to your site from the search engines.
6. Links to social media sites
In today’s “social” Internet, enough cannot be said about having links to the social media sites on which you participate. People want to stay connected with you and your brand. Including links to your social media profiles can make that easy for your customers and prospects by ensuring that your site links directly to your social media profiles.
7. Landing page and opt-in form for a free giveaway
A landing page with an opt-in form allows you to grow your marketing list via the people who are visiting your site. If you offer them something of value, like an ebook, in exchange for their name and email address, you can easily begin to build a list of prospective customers. Then, you can begin to email those prospects regularly to enhance their Like, Know, and Trust factor of you so that they will become customers.
8. Increase internal links
Need to give a particular page a rankings boost? Link to it from existing high authority pages on your site can help the target page to rank better. Here’s what you can do:
- Make a list of target pages you’d like to rank better.
- Identify the pages on your website that currently have the most authority and “SEO juice.” You can get an idea about this from your Google Analytics dashboard.
- Add a link from your authority page(s) to your target page(s).
- Incorporate the link naturally on the authority page using anchor text related to the keyword for which you’d like the target page to rank.
9. Update content frequently
The best way to attract search engines to your site is to update your content frequently. The easiest way to do this is to post to your blog at least once a week. You can use a WordPress plugin like RankMath to post an optimized version on your blog to bring more traffic to your site.
10. Enhance off-page SEO
One of the best ways to enhance off-page SEO is through content syndication, like video and slide-sharing sites. In addition, business directory listing sites like Manta and Merchant Circle are especially powerful for brick and mortar businesses. And, if you haven’t yet created your Google My Business Listing, now is the best time to do that to increase your visibility online. All of these steps lead to helping your site dominate the first page of Google when a search for your business shows the listings for your company on various sites.
Your business website is the foundation of your online business. Don’t let it sit on a server never to be found by your target market. Use these 10 simple tips to tweak your website so that you can increase website traffic to your business website.
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