SEO Consult Blog

There is a host of ways to increase traffic to your site, they don’t take long, but they need to be done.  Business owners often lack the time, or are too lazy to do maintenance, or small fixes. Eventually their site stops attracting traffic or if it is found it does nothing to entice them to stay, in fact they are so put off and don’t come back.

There are numerous ways to tweak a website in order to attract higher traffic volumes and higher conversions, but most are ignored, or to be fair, perhaps they are not known.  Even though SEO has been around for more than a decade, many sites don’t take advantage of the little fixes which Google need to assess a website and which are vital if you want your visitors to find what they are looking for.

Really quick and clean fixes

Give Google a boost by supplying them with the right signals.

Start with Titles.   Even if you are performing well in Google add one more keyword to your title tag.  Subtract one if you are weak in Google.  Remove or shorten your company name and move it to the end of the title and try adding often searched for modifiers to your title, something like ‘shop’, ‘buy’ or ‘affordable’.

Next are Meta tags.  Repeat your keywords at the beginning of the Meta description and remove all other Meta tags as they can clutter your code and make the ‘code to content ratio’ look not so hot.  Remember that Google ignores most of them anyway.

Another signal is Headlines.  Add a sentence which explains your h1 headline.  This is called an h2 headline.  You can also add an h3 headline that includes a teaser, but don’t repeat your keywords too often.

Back links & PageRank.  Ask your friends or family for a link to your site or link out to one of your favorite sites who has a similar product to you.  Add ‘permalinks’ to your site and add nofollow attributes to your contact page link.

Copywriting

Your pages need mention of what it is exactly that is on your site.  You need to use branding, the exact product names and where it is offered, why it is offered and to whom it is available, for example holiday makers.  Detract from any confusion; make your content clear and in doing so you will make who you are and what your product is about very clear too.

Make an unordered list that reflects the most relevant topics of the page.  Three is sufficient.  Place it at the top of the page, saying something like “this page, or article, deals with …” and explain one key term per page.

Try adding at least five tags to your pages such as “Tags: tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5”.  Or “Tags: sunshine, ocean, relaxing, luxury, lazy”.

Replace the images on your homepage with smaller ones so that those who are not using broadband are not excluded from doing business with you.

Convince your visitors to buy.  Include text in the first few sentences which draw them in by building them up before your expound the virtues of your product.

Any, but preferable all these fixes are quick and easy to do.  But the rewards they yield far outweighs the time spent doing them.  Many sites miss out on opportunities because they don’t want to spend less than an hour fixing their websites.  Sad.

One upon a time it was sufficient to have a website which promoted online business, today much more is needed to create an impact in the online business community which has lead to greater competition and the need for newer techniques in social media marketing.  Social media marketing experts will tell you that it is vital to continuously promote your site, your products and services, through the use techniques such as article submission.

There are countless ways to promote online success, why is article submission important?

Article submission

Is a process which refers to the submitting of article directories so that you can get hyperlinks from other websites who are happy to publish your content.   It is cost effective when used as a way to increase your links and when used to enhance your chances of appearing at the top of a search engine’s results page.

There are a vast amount of article directory sites, or submission sites which publish articles that have been written by SEO copywriters on various topics.  They are categorised with each category having within it hundreds of articles posted under each title.  Those pages which are unique and which contain keyword-rich content end up at the top of the list and generate more traffic than those that scrape by with copied content or little content.

Whether an article is intended for corporate or smaller concerns, they all need to be written by SEO copywriters who possess SEO techniques and technical abilities that will increase the chance of them appearing high up on a results page.

Start at the website designing stage

Design a website must take SEO into account.  So set up your page content in order to make sure that the most important parts of the article come first in the HTML coding.

Search engines have little spiders that continuously crawl around your HTML, reading it in the order that it is presented on the page.  Some give higher priority to text that appears toward the beginning of the document, while some don’t.  The reason they do this is because they don’t have human instincts and cannot recognise what bits of the page are important or relevant to your site.

In view of this it makes perfect sense to put your most important content first in the HTML.  Navigation comes after your main content.  The closer you can get your content to the <body> tag, the higher the priority it will be accorded by the search engine.  Most layouts present a problem with getting content first, especially where columns are concerned.

Try floating your layouts instead.  This one of the easiest ways to create a layout that allows your content to come first while the navigation column can be wherever you want it to be, left or right.  It is simple process of placing your navigation in the second division of your HTML and letting it float to the left.

SEO friendly content

This is not difficult; it is simply content which has been written with at least some attention having being given to how a search engine might view it. However, content is always about how people see it.  If you are faced with a choice of having to write articles which are good for either a search engine or for a person, choose the one that is good for the reader.