How to get more traffic to your website.

If you are new to the world of the Search Engines, then this article is for you. This article gives you some hints tips and general advice about how to get more traffic to your website especially from Google who are currently the leading Search Engine.

How it works

Google organises pages by relevance, which is a combination of the text on the page and the number and quality of links into that pages from other pages on the internet and what phrase is used within the link (known as its anchor text) Some phrases will be obscure and others competitive. Some pages can have a handful of links, others can have millions. If you are trying to compete with a page that is both well written and has a huge number of links then you are going to find it very hard work indeed to get anywhere.

Keywords

Choosing a keyword that is appropriate and realistic to compete under is the first step, we recommend using the Google Keyword tool which can be found from within their Google Adwords product. This shows the number of searches per month for each phrase you select. This will therefore give you a good idea of how much value there will be to getting to the top of the search engine results for that phrase.

Ideally you need to find a niche for your pages, one where the competition is reasonable but the phrase is still valuable for your needs.

Good text

The search engines have become progressively better at spotting quality text, they have a huge database now of web pages to compare your page to. The sort of factors that they now use to evaluate text:-

 
• Is it unique
 
• Is the reading level appropriate for the topic, there are now mathematical formulae that can score a page based on how it uses nouns, verbs and other grammar structures.
 
• How long to visitors stay on a page, this is a good indicator that it's interesting.
 
• Spelling and grammar errors

Once you have chosen the keyphrase or phrases you want your page to target, you now need to write the best possible content for that page. If the Search Engines give it a higher score than your competitors then you have a chance at appearing above them all others factors being equal.

Links

You now need to find good quality links from related pages and point them at your new page. This is a long term approach and the search engines measure things like:-

 
• How many links does your page have in total
 
• How many were added in the last 90 days and how many were removed or deleted
 
• How many different unique web sites were involved
 
• Where each of the web pages on unique hosting accounts - it is not going to work well if your only source of links are all from the same owners web hosting account
 
• How trusted or credible is the page that links to you? For example a link from BBC website would be hugely more useful that a website you just created yourself last week.

This factor is the biggest one, and can require 99% of the effort involved in getting the results you are looking for.

Other page factors

These are less important that the other points listed, but nevertheless still useful to get right if you can:-

 
• Does the html code on the page validate
 
• Professional design - this will help to reduce bounce rates
 
• Meta tags - The title tag should be descriptive and use your main key phrases, the description tag should be well written and encourage your visitor to click the link as this is the text that appears on the search results page.
 
• Good use of headings such as the H1 and H2 heading tags.
 
• Use other tags properly such as alt attributes for images
 
• Make use of media such as images if appropriate as these increase the interest level and time on page.

Social factors

Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and increasingly Google's own +1 product, these are all indicators that your page is being discussed on social sites. The more discussion the better.

An increasing percentage of your marketing strategy should be put towards a social marketing strategy.

Keeping up with the Algorithms

Keeping an eye on forums that discuss the latest developments in the Search Engine world is a good idea. Don't get drawn too deep into this area though. The basics of getting traffic are simple:-

 
• Create great unique content
 
• Collect links from great and interesting places.

It works! If you are not seeing the amount of traffic you need, then either you do not have sufficient quality or quantity within your websites content, or you are just suffering from a lack of sufficient and quality inward links.

If you need help with any of the above, then why not reach out to us? Here at Discount Domains we have our own professional team of copywriters, great designers and coders and a well respected Search Marketing team that have a proven demonstrable record of search marketing success.

Call us now on 01952 288383 to get discuss your individual requirements further.

Adrian Lawrence is the author of this article and is one of the webmasters at Discount Domains https://plus.google.com/u/0/106088322856862782725/posts