91 Experts Share the Most Effective SEO Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website [Expert Roundup]

If you have a website, the idea is for people to visit it. A website’s traffic reflects how well a business is doing online. It is also an indicator of customer behavior, and will help you formulate a marketing strategy that will get you a better ranking in the search engine results.

The basic idea of SEO optimization is getting more traffic to the website. But with 1.24 billion websites in the world, how do you ensure that your website gets good traffic?

Here are my top seven SEO tips that will help drive traffic to your website:

7 SEO Tips to Drive Traffic

Keywords: In most searches, at least 50% of people use four words or more. This means that just keywords are not important. You need long-tail keywords that are specific to the search.

When it comes to broad keywords, there is tough competition out there which means that you need to offer something more to stand out among the crowd. A long-tail keyword is important so that people get specific results for what they are looking for.

Good Quality Content: In this competitive world, there are many people who write on the same topic. What should you do different to get listed at the top of the search listings? The answer is writing good, well-researched content.

The content on your website should also be diverse to avoid any internal competition among web pages for search engine listings. You need to organize your website in way that when people search for something specific, all related information is easily accessible. Also make sure that your content is regularly updated as search engines regularly check for updates to provide the best result to its users. Writing good content can boost up your traffic and ultimately affects your SEO.

Meta Description and Title Tags: Title tags are similar to a book title. This is the clickable link that appears on search engine result pages. If we take Google’s example, an ideal title tag should be less than 60 characters.

A meta description is what appears below the title in search engine results. This is what creates the first impression on a user, and trust me, first impressions matter. If you have a good and concise meta description, there’s a better chance of people visiting your web page and also good for SEO. 

Optimize Images: Images are what add color to a web page and make it less boring. I can’t even think of a web page with images. For a better search engine listing, make sure that you optimize the images by adding descriptions, alt tags, and titles. Its beneficial for your website SEO efforts. 

A search engine can’t identify an image’s content. It is the text with an image that helps them rate how relevant a page is. For this, use original, optimally sized, good quality images.

Backlinks: For a search engine, backlinks are an endorsement of a website. A guest blog on another site that links back to yours will drive traffic to your website.

Getting a listing in online directories will also drive traffic to your website. The description of your business in a e-directory will have a link to your website. Make sure you continuously update your information in these directories to generate traffic and increase your SEO ranking.

SSL Certificates: For a search engine, an SSL certification is important. What an SSL certificate basically does is it changes your website’s “https://” to “https://” that makes it more trustworthy and protected. If you want a search engine to trust you, a SSL certificate is a must.

Mobile Friendliness: According to Google, there are more mobile searches than on desktops in 10 countries including Japan and the US. In order to capitalize on this growing trend, your website needs to be mobile friendly.

Of course, other than these basic SEO tips, there are many other ways that SEO can help drive traffic to your website. Below, 91 SEO experts share their best SEO tips for traffic generation.

#1. Barry Schwartz – Search Engine Roundtable

Build something that Google would be embarrassed not to rank well in their search engine.

 #2. Larry Kim – MobileMonkey, Inc

There’s one other factor you can — and should be — focusing on. It’s something that could double your traffic. Yet so many people are overlooking it.

Your organic click-through rate.

Does your website have cancer? Do you have the symptoms?

Are people bouncing off your pages like rubber balls? Is your click-through rate ridiculously low?

If so, it’s dragging down your overall domain-level engagement metrics.

Follow these ridiculous hacks to raise your CTR (and raise your organic search rankings)

#3. Ann Handley – MarketingProfs

My general SEO advice is: Create user-centric content that answers the questions your prospects have, and that makes them feel like you understand their problems, shoulder their burdens along with them, and feel their pain.

Is that SEO advice or is that Content advice? My answer = Yes.

#4. Eric Enge – Stone Temple Consulting

The bad about this question is that people will hate the simple response, which is to add great content to your site. People hate this answer because everyone says it nowadays, but the reality is that it’s true.

However, let’s dig a little deeper. This is about where Google (and even others like Facebook) are going. They’re all in a war to win the hearts and minds of users. Their hold on market share is wholly dependent on their ability to provide a quality user experience. In today’s world, even if your Google or Facebook, if you fall off a bit in the value off your use experience, overall market share will suffer.

For Google, user experience means offering the right pages in their search results that offer the best, most direct, most complete answer to the users needs. My belief is that this is largely what Google’s machine learning programs are targeted at evaluating.

For you, as the publisher of a website, the practical impact is that improving your site content quality, and depth, offers the following benefits:

1. Increased conversions from users on your site.

2. Increase search traffic as Google starts to see your site as offering more value.

Let me state the tips clearly: improving the quality of your content on your site will likely increase your SEO traffic. To be successful at this, you need to understand how Google defines better content. Usually that means deeper, more comprehensive, content.

(PS: doing this well will increase your ability to get featured snippets too)

This tips of improving your site content quality (and the user experience) on your site needs to be a religion, and a continuous pursuit.

It’s the key to your short term, and long term, success.

#5. Andy Crestodina – Orbit Media Studios

Indicate relevance. This is the most important, most effective SEO tactic or tips there is. If you expect to rank for a phrase, you need to use that phrase in the title, the header and the body text. It sounds obvious, but it isn’t. Go back to any page that isn’t ranking where you hoped and give it the “Control + F Test.” Just using the find feature of your browser will show you if it’s optimized or not…

Source: Orbit Media, SEO Advice

Keep in mind that although the phrase may have appeared in links, these don’t count when you’re indicating relevance for this page. Links indicate the relevance of the page they link to, not the page they’re on. So use the phrase in the body text here and in links there!

Read the full article on Shane Barker's Digital Marketing blog.