Designing a beautiful website for your business or personal blog takes a lot of vision and hard work, but after all that effort, there are few things more disheartening than getting no traffic. What many inexperienced website owners (and far too many experienced website owners) don't realize is that it takes far more than a beautiful website to attract visitors. It is very unlikely that web users will just happen across your website or type in the URL by chance. Unless users are already looking for your site, you will need to take the necessary steps to drive traffic to your website through search engine results. In order to raise your website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERPS), you need to implement a strategic SEO plan. SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is the number one way to increase web traffic.
To help everyone understand what this entails, here are the top SEO do's and don'ts according to the professionals.
1. DO Focus on the Technical Aspects of Your Website
The first thing you will need to do to start generating more traffic is to focus on the technical aspects of your website and make sure that you address any technical faults. The folks at SEOJet.net explain that technical problems will harm your site both with the search engine algorithms which decide website rankings and with your visitors. Everybody hates a website that is slow to load or has broken links or poorly designed menus. If a visitor comes to your site and doesn't have a perfect user experience, they are very unlikely to stick around on your site for long and are even less likely to come back and give it a second chance. Put yourself in your visitors' shoes and provide them with a website that reflects your business, brand or blog message.
2. DO Provide Visitors with Fantastic Content
After addressing the technical glitches on your website, you need to focus on the content that you are providing visitors. Every SEO expert knows a successful website is all about content, content, content! You need to give your visitors quality, engaging content that is easy to access and is better than your competitors. There are more than a billion websites on the Internet and you can be sure that a good number of them will be in direct competition with yours. Offer multimedia content, eye-catching color schemes, relevant images, and cool graphics. Do some research on your main competitors and analyze what visitors like about their content when planning your own. This doesn't just mean imitating them, it means planning a content strategy to offer something even better.
3. DO Research the Most Searched for Keywords
The main way most web users find what they are looking for is by entering keywords into a search engine. If you want to increase the traffic to your website then you need to implement one of the most important SEO tools: keyword research. Find out which words users most commonly search for when they are looking for the type of product, service, or content that your website provides. If you have a website for your London bicycle store, for example, web users are most likely to search for the term “London bicycle stores”. By conducting keyword research on that term, you will be able to identify the other related keywords which you will need to include in your on-site content. This needs to be done with the correct keyword ratios to maximize its SEO effect.
4. DON'T Use Poor Quality Backlinks
Off-site SEO is just as important as the on-site steps explained above. In order to take your website to another level, you need to start building backlinks on other websites as this can really accelerate you up the SERP rankings. Not all backlinks are born the same and it is crucial that you identify quality websites to host your links. You need to choose sites that are already regarded by the search engine algorithms as authorities in your field. After that, build relationships with the owners of those websites or pay for them to host your backlinks on well-written guest posts. Quality is better than quantity when it comes to backlinks, and if you choose the wrong sites or just pay for hundreds of links to just be thrown anywhere, it can seriously affect your website's ranking.
5. DON'T Forget the Importance of Social Media
Social media has huge potential for SEO purposes and you should never underestimate its importance. Using social media in the right way is ideal for increasing traffic to your site, promoting new website content, and building your online brand. The most important things are identifying the social media platforms potential visitors use most frequently, and providing regular, quality content which they will find engaging. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the most used social media platforms but there are many others that can be perfect for increasing traffic to different niches of websites.
6. DON'T Panic if You Don't Get Immediate Results
An effective SEO strategy takes time and so do the results. It is important that you are patient and don't panic if you don't see results immediately. Make sure you run in-depth analysis on every aspect of your SEO tactics and make adjustments where they are necessary but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take each step systematically and you will start to see incremental, long-lasting results.
Getting started out with your SEO strategy can be daunting, especially if you are inexperienced with SEO. It is crucial that you address every aspect of the plan step by step so that you have a beautiful, perfectly functioning website that ranks highly and attracts visitors. Whether you own a personal blog or a business website selling your products and services, you won't succeed unless you have implemented the right SEO tools. Don't write off your SEO strategy if you don't immediately see results because it can take time to show the fruits of your labor. Pay attention to these do's and don'ts and you will have everything you need for a great website.
