SEO Strategies and Concepts for Creating Website Traffic
Advice for Newbies – Use “White Hat” Organic, Natural Techniques. Watch Out for Scammers and Hyped Up Promises of Quick, Easy Traffic or Automatic Links.
SEO for Website Traffic, Tools, Resources, Training, and Terminology
Quality content is king. Meet your visitors needs with solutions for their issues.
Original content that solves problems will spread in a viral manner.
Search engines are very good at detecting duplicate content or thin, poor content. Keep the quality high for good search engine rankings.
Organic, Local Traffic
If you have a local services, information or products site you can go to Google My Business (formerly Google Places) and list your site for free. You will be automatically included in the Google Places results and map in the search engine results.
Your site shows up in the list of local resources when people search by location and keyword. There is a map with red ballons showing business locations next to the list of results when people search for a business within a certain location.
Google Places for Home Business: If you work at home you can choose not to show up on the map but still be included in the local list online. Google places provides room for you to describe your products or services, contact information, website link and so on.
Visitor Traffic Tips List
- WordPress SEO– Add one of the top WordPress SEO plugins. Check out either the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast or the All in One WordPress SEO plugin. They start working out of the box, immediately upon activation. They also supply invaluable guides for creating content that is optimized.
- Solution Oriented Content: Visitors search for solutions to their problems and needs whether it’s facts, how to do something, or entertainment. What do people need? What problems are they solving? What do they want? Supply the answers and you have an audience for your website. When you write your articles be sure to provide real quality and enough length so search engines believe it is a quality site not a spam site.
- Youtube Video Marketing: Video marketing on youtube is a top way to bring traffic (create videos for articles that are on the site, upload the videos to youtube and add a link to your site in the description under the video). When you upload a video to youtube optimize it using the keywords in the title and description. Write a long, thorough description to get the best ranking on youtube and in google (since videos show up in google searches).
- Social Media Marketing: Sharing content (website posts and pages and yotube videos) on facebook, twitter, linkedin, google+ and other social media, spreads linka to your site in a viral manner. Answering questions for free in online forums or bulletin boards related to your site’s subject is a great way to get targeted traffic. People in the forums are searching for answers and they can click on the link to your website to get more information. Inbound traffic from links in social media or from search traffic is targeted, high quality traffic.
- Content Marketing: Blogging is another top way to get traffic, since adding new content keeps visitors coming back and provides more material for the search engines and more links in the search engines and social media results to your site. Create original content, avoid duplicate content (search engines don’t like to rank duplicate content) and most importantly create content that solves a problem for someone or meets a need or a want. That’s why they are searching – for answers. If you have a standard website with a static homepage you can still easily add a blog with a useful articles to it.
- Email Marketing: Set up an email subscription so visitors can get each new blog post automatically sent to their email plus newsletters and other helpful material.
- Keyword Research: Go to the free google keywords tool for starters and become familiar with what keywords people are searching for that are relevant to your site content. Keyword stuffing has long been a way to get punished in the search engine rankings so be sure to avoid that. Write in a natural way, not an artificial keyword stuffed manner. Researching keywords is a good way to see what solutions or needs people are searching for. Then you can write an article and create a video to meet those needs. Try to find keywords that have a lot of searches but not much competition. Use them when you optimize your youtube videos by writing a long, useful description.
- Google Places: List for free with google places whether you have a physical brick and mortar place of business or not. This puts your site on the list when people search locally and if you do have a physical business site you can give google places the address and it will show up on the map that accompanies the list of local answers to the visitor’s search. If you work from home you chance choose to not have the location show up on the map but a link to your website can still be listed.
- Install SEO Plugin: In your dashboard go to plugins and check the featured and popular plugins or search for an seo plugin. There are a variety of good ones and you can look at their ratings and details to choose one.
- Offline Marketing: Use business cards, leaflets, flyers, free classes and presentations to market your site offline.
- Links to Your Site: Links from quality, related sites to your site help to increase your site’s authority and improves search engine ranking. If you are selling computer services then a link from a site providing a computer or software related service would be relevant. A link from a low quality, low ranked, spam site would be the opposite of what helps search engine ranking. In fact it can hurt it a lot. Beware of the many scams.
- Search Engine Ranking: The search engines have a complex formula for comparing your site with others. You are competing with the other sites in your subject area. If you can narrow it down to a niche where there is a demand but not as much supply then you have a better chance of getting on the front page. Surveys shows people usually click on one of the first three sites so if you are farther down the page or on the second page your site will get few if any clicks. Each article that is a page or post on the site has it’s own distinct link. If someone searches for the topic in that particular article then the search engine compares all the available results and puts the best ones at the top.
- Set the Permalinks for Good SEO: The permalink refers to the distinct link that goes with each individual page. If you do not reset the permalink it results in one of those long garbled links that is not readable and does not mean anything to a search engine either. To let the search engines know what is in the article or post you can reset the link so it has the name of the website followed by the category and the title of the article posted. So go to the Dashboard to Settings and under that to Permalinks. Put a dot in the radio button for Custom Link and type of paste in the following: /%category%/%postname%/
- Sign up for free Google Webmaster Tools: The tools will provide a variety of resources that are invaluable. Please see the video on this subject for more information and visit Google Webmaster Tools
- Sign up for free Google Analytics: This will enable you to track the numbers of visitors, which content is most popular and a huge variety of other useful information that can guide in you as you continue to grow your website.
- Use a Mobile Device Responsive WordPress Theme: Smartphones and tablets sales are fast outpacing laptops and pc sales. Use a WordPress theme that detects the mobile device that the visitor is using and that resizes and rearranges the website to suit the size of the screen. WordPress Twenty Twelve, the official featured theme for 2012 was designed for “Mobile First.” You can search under Themes for mobile responsive themes.
- Test Your Website on Mobile Devices and Different Screen Sizes: You can go to Screenfly and it is free to enter your website, put a check mark in the box for “use proxy server to mimic devices” and test your site. You will be able to see how the text, images and elements get rearranged when they are seen on a smartphone or tablet. Even the different tablet and smartphone sizes are included. This is important. For instance, if your website is for something like a restaurant then it’s critical that it is easy to view on all kinds of smartphones.
- Get the SEO Facts Straight From Google Webmaster Help on Youtube: Google software engineers upload videos to answer questions from the public and you can search the list of videos or browse them. The internet is full of misinformation and old information so if you subscribe to google’s youtube channel you will get the facts and you will be up to date.
- Hubspot Marketing Site Grader: Go to Hubspot for a free site grading with automatic suggestions for improving your site. The site grade and report covers all aspects of your site, sales funnel, online optimization, social media optimization and more.
- Craigslist: Put a link to your website in the description when you list your services offered or products for sale on craigslist under the appropriate listing. It’s free. You can also include a link to a relevant youtube video from your channel showcasing your services or products. The goal is to create an internet presence that will help spread your website content in a viral fashion, perform well with the search engines, and encourage people to visit your website.
Your internet presence can start with a wordpress site, facebook account, facebook business page, youtube channel, twitter account and good quality, original content that makes people want to share it and link to it. You can also participate in forums, especially in answering questions, to help bring traffic to your site.
If you are using affiliate marketing and/or selling online then getting targeted traffic to your site is critical for your business. An important word here is “targeted” because you need traffic from people who will be interested in your affiliate links or products.
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