“How do I get more people to visit my site?”
Here at Keza Media, we hear this all of the time. If only there was an easy “just do this one magic thing”! But as we all know, technology always changes, so therefore so does the ins and outs of web traffic. But! Don’t lose hope. There are many things you can do so that Google finds you before others. Below are some things that we recommend that are always good to do and great to fall in the habit to:
1) PRODUCE QUALITY CONTENT
Relevant content could be the top reason search engines find your site. If there is only one thing you take away from this article, remember this. Yes, content is King, but QUALITY content is ruler of all.
We’ll dive into how to make your content really shine, so be sure to keep reading. But first, make sure you remember to use your heading tags (such as H1, most importantly), bold and italics to emphasize your message and focus key phrase. Just make sure you don’t go overboard. You want your content to read naturally. This could sound counter-productive, but remember to write for the reader, not for SEO, it will actually hurt more than help.
2) CREATE SHARE-WORTHY CONTENT
Somebody out there is searching to read something, and have it be intriguing enough that they (gasp!) share it — let it be what you write! The key here is to really write something. What I mean is, cutting/pasting a top 10 quick list from another site doesn’t do the trick. You want to get in-depth, with detailed, informational content. Yes, it is recommended that you have at least 500 characters… but that is a MINIMUM suggestion. Blow that suggestion away and write something 3000 characters or more. What happens then is… more information, and more for search engines to crawl. Win-win!
3) FRESH, UPDATED CONTENT
Now that you are creating these top-quality, share-worthy posts and pages, you need to KEEP creating them. Not only does it keep visitors coming back for more, but it is also a great indicator to search engines of your site’s relevancy. So keep ‘em coming!
4) PICK A KEYPHRASE – AND FOCUS ON IT
When somebody does a search on a subject, Google and other search engines will show the most relevant results by sites that have the search term the most on the page. This means, use it everywhere – the title, the URL, the image file names that are used on the page, and be sure to include it multiple times within the content itself. “Back in the day” it used to be all about meta keywords. Sites would just list ANYTHING to get their pages picked up on, even if their page had nothing to do with the subject. This clearly didn’t make for real relevant results for online searchers. Google and other search engines quickly picked up on this. Now, content is truly king, and search engines focus on the usage of the keyword to make sure it is actual, pertinent content.
5) INCLUDE PIN-ABLE PICTURES
Not only do our eyes need a break from all of the 3000+ characters you are writing (wink, wink), but nice photos and graphics really can change the tone and impression given of your page. It doesn’t have to be a picture of a smiling person, infographics and products shots are all great. These are all highly shareable on social media, especially Pinterest. Don’t forget that when somebody Pins a picture, that picture always links back to the original source (your website)! While you are at it, make sure you have a Pinterest account for your site, and try to be active on it.
6) ADD THE SMALL DETAILS
On your pages and posts, be sure to add in links to outside sites. And make the links work for you, meaning have descriptive links. Using something like “learn more” for a link does absolutely nothing for your SEO. Having a link that says “Keza’s tips for boosting your web traffic” is not only descriptive, but it is rich with those important keywords you’re trying to focus on, and adds value to your users.
Use alt tags (or alternative text descriptions) on your images and videos. Search engines crawl the heck out of this, where otherwise an image doesn’t do much more than the filename (which we know an image called “Screenshot_010819.png” does NOTHING for your SEO.
Refer to how Google ranks content. This includes everything discussed here, and more. This is a great article that lists out over 200 ranking factors from Google. Check it out and bookmark for reference.
7) USE THOSE TOOLS! THEY ARE THERE FOR A REASON
There are tools out there for you to utilize to help increase your SEO and boost your web traffic. Why not use them? Some tools that we find invaluable here at Keza Media are:
Google Search Console:
This replaced the beloved Webmaster Tools, but with improvements. This tool is meant for helping you improve your performance on Google specifically, but will absolutely help with all search engines. (And let’s face it — most of us use Google still the majority of the time.) It features tools to measure your site traffic and performance, fix issues, optimize your content, submit site maps, alerts for site issues and more.
Yoast:
If you are on WordPress, Yoast is a great tool. If you can, invest it the Pro version. It really helps in so many ways, including:
Snippet Editor: Ever notice in search results, the description of the page makes no sense at all or is cut off mid-sentence? This lets you edit it per page to make the most of that title and description area and makes sure you don’t go over the character limit.
Focus Keyphrase: As discussed above, picking a key phrase to focus on in your content is a great way to make sure you emphasize it appropriately throughout the article or page. This tool will point out where it should be and if you should add it in more often.
Readability: This tool lets you know how you stand on the readability scale (remember how we said it is important that it flows naturally!) and suggestion on how to improve it.
Social Sharing: Nothing is worse than writing up a great blog post and someone sharing it (yay!), only to see it appear on Facebook with a blurry image and cut off description. This is because Facebook uses its own algorithm to grab your content, and may pick the wrong content, images or even worse, straight out code. This tool lets you pick the image, and edit the title and description for Facebook and Twitter.
Redirects: If you went back and followed some of the above advice, and end up updating your URL to reflect your focus key phrase, your old URL for that page is now gone. Yoast Pro will automatically add a redirect for you so that if someone had bookmarked it, they won’t get that dreaded 404 error page. You can also create your own redirects on the fly if you simply remove a page or update your site structure.
semRush:
There are a lot of tools out there that you can check out keywords, analytics, rankings and traffic of your site, but semRush goes a step further. It lets you check out other sites to see how people are finding them so that you may learn by seeing how they perform. It also has some other really useful tools such as the Magic Keyword tool, Topic Research and the SEO writing assistant.
8) GO BACK AND FIX THE OLD STUFF
What do we mean by this? Now that you are learning what to do going forward, it doesn’t hurt to go back and optimize your older pages and blog posts to perform all of the nifty tips you are learning here. Want to know where to start? Take a look at your keyword rankings – look in Google Analytics or try a tool like SEMrush. Start with the lesser ranked pages to get them improved.
Once you get into the habits listed above, you’ll see it gets easier to implement all of these methods. Until you do, give some of the tools out there a shot to help you out. Just always remember that fresh, quality content is really the best and most important thing you can do to increase your web traffic. Of course, if you need some more help, Keza is always available. Get in touch with us to find out how. Now get writing!