Member Article

A Beginners Guide On How To Drive Traffic In SEO

93% of the online purchase decisions are made using search engines and for B2B purchases, this figure is 71%. In short, you just cannot ignore search engines for driving traffic to your website.

The question is how to do so. And for new businesses, how quickly can they master the SEO game to rank higher and get more traffic, leads, sales.

This is how you can make it happen by following a few points, which are as follows:-

1) Content is king

No matter how much you try to tweak other areas of a website for its SEO ranking, the fact remains that content is king. People go to search engines to find information or solution to their problems if not for entertainment. In fact, search engines were created to help netizens find information more easily and quickly.

If you cannot create or give valuable content to your users on an ongoing basis, then the ranking of your webpage will naturally suffer

2) Title and Meta Description

When you have a catchy title and a well-written meta description, it makes useful for search engines to rank your content highly as visitors are readily able to get the required information on the search engine itself without having to go to the website. Thus, meta descriptions act as a snapshot of the content on the website.

3) Create URLs that are SEO-friendly

Another strategy that is used by search engines such as Google or Bing is that it tracks the URLs of the website, for the keyword searched, to rank websites on its pages. So if you have URLs that are descriptive and informative, then you have higher chances of being ranked better for a search result.

Here’s an example of a good and a bad URL:

Bad URLs

• www.example.com/11547892

• www.example.com/page1content3

• www.example.com/howtorankyourwebpage

Good URLs

• www.example.com/valuable-seo-tips

• www.example.com/how-to-rank-your-webpage

This way, not only it becomes easier for search engines to track your website for keywords, but also is useful for the visitor to know about the content on the webpage.

4) Backlinks

A backlink is an incoming link to your website from other websites. If there are a higher number of websites sending traffic to your website, then the search engine thinks that your website has something worthwhile to offer and hence, ranks you higher.

A word of caution: In recent years, many webmasters misused this strategy and created backlinks from other websites not relevant to it.

If you do this, then the search engine will penalize you and rank you lower.

This means that the quality of your backlinks matter than the quantity. In other words, be assured that the traffic to your website coming from reliable and credible sources or just any other website.

5) Mobile Website

Many studies have shown that more than 80% of the search engine traffic comes from mobile and 14% come only from a desktop. And a majority of online purchases are made from a mobile device. So an online marketer must focus on making his website mobile-responsive if he or she wants to tap a larger audience.

6) Add security certificates

Many websites come to fleece and defraud people either for their information or their money. This is called phishing. When you add SSL security certificate to your website, this assures the visitors that you are a genuine company or a website that they can trust. This is also a good way of distinguishing oneself from the millions of other websites. Search engines rank secure websites higher than non-secure ones.

7) Avoid keyword competition

In today’s competitive world, in the pursuit of getting more visitors, webmasters keep to adding content and web pages. But what most don’t realize that they are also inadvertently cannibalizing their own keywords which make their site rank lower.

A case in point is when a website with the same keyword writes five different articles with distinct titles and uploads to its websites. So when the search engines search for a particular keyword, the keywords on a website compete with themselves. This makes the ranking of the website to nosedive.

The solution for this is to add pages for the same keyword. For, eg. Page 1, Page 2, ….Page, 5. This way the one article capitalizes on the content with just one keyword.

8) Optimize images and videos

People prefer to see images than just read over dry text. Though content in the form of text will remain the dominant way to search for information or solution, it is the images that enhance the user experience that is of prime importance for a search engine to highly rank a website.

For this to happen the newbies who want to use SEO to drive traffic to their website should hire UI/ UX designer who would create appropriate alt tags, description and titles for your videos and images, as search engines cannot identify the image or video content. Hence, the content associated with it has to be accurate.

9) Use internal links

The cost of acquiring a visitor or a customer online is very high. Once you do that, you have to ensure that he stays on your website for long or makes more purchases. Despite this knowledge, many websites do not properly internal user links.

Internal links connect different web pages of your websites. The content so highlighted on a webpage is linked to the relevant content on the other webpage.

If you use this SEO strategy properly, then people will stay longer on your website which is a parameter that ranks your website higher.

10) Page loading speed

This is an age of speed. People want things in an instant. The same is true of a website. Research shows that if a site takes 1 to 5 seconds for your page to load, then the bounce rate is 90%. That means you lose 900 visitors for every 1000 people visiting your page if it does not load in optimum time. The resultant impact on revenue or web traffic over time is huge.

You can improve the speed of your website by doing the following:-

–Remove plug-ins that are not required or javascript

– test your web loading speed before launching it

– Use Google Page Speed Service for enhancing your performance

–Use cloud services for if you have a lot of images that take time to load

–Test your website loading speed on different platforms and devices

There is no single SEO strategy that suits every business. It is the permutation and combination of many factors that make the website rank higher on the search engine.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by The NineHertz .