How to Leverage SEO to Get More Visitors to Your Website in 2016
If you’re wise, you will strive to get to the first page of Google…
Why?
Because, the first page captures the majority of thetraffic. Most people won’t look beyond the first page.
And, even on the first page, the traffic isn’t evenly spread. The top-ranked result captures a very significant amount of the traffic.
So, its very crucial to increase the chances that your website will rank as high as possible when someone performs a Google search for a keyword related to your industry.
The first step in this process is to understand a little bit about how Google works.
It does two basic things:
- Finds and stores website pages in its index
- Processes user searches and matches the best web pages from its index
In order to rank well your pages need to be indexed and then out of all of the pages matching your specific keyword Google needs to think yours is the best.
Ranking is based on relevance and authority.
The relevance of your page is based on things like the title tag, page content, and the anchor text of links to that page.
The authority is based on the number of links from other web pages and the authority of those pages.
You want to get as many links as possible from as many authoritative sites as possible.
The way to do this is to create high quality and relevant content that users would want to find.
The first step in SEO is figuring out what keywords you want to optimize for your site. To do that answer these three questions:
- What are some keywords that a potential prospect looking for your product or service would search for?
- How many times do users search for that specific keyword?
- How hard will it be to rank for that keyword based on your competition?
Pay-per-click
If you’re just getting started and its in your budget it can be useful to run a small pay-per-click campaign. It will begin generating traffic almost immediately and you can measure the conversion rate for traffic from various keywords.
Once you’ve picked your keywords you need to start using them on your website.
Page Title Tag
One of the most important elements of the page for SEO is the page title tag.
Make sure you put your most important keywords in your page title and put them first.
Put your company name at the end of the title so that your more important keywords have more weight.
Meta Description
While the meta description doesn’t impact search rankings its important because its often included below the page title so if you write a compelling description you’re more likely to get clicks.
When writing your meta description make sure you keep it short. No more than 160 characters.
Each page should have a unique description and use your keywords because Google will often show those keywords in bold in your description which increases the likelihood of users clicking.
URLs and Domain Names
Customize the URLs for your web pages. If you have your target keywords in the URL you will have a higher chance of getting anchor text with them when people link to your page. And, since the domain name is part of the URLs on your site its useful to have an important keyword in it.
Page Content- Headings and Images
Include your important keywords in your headings. It sends a signal that those words are important when Google is going through your web page. The same goes for images. You should customize them and their URLs to contain your keywords.
The takeaway here is to choose your keywords and choose them wisely.