3 Ways to Increase Traffic to Yoiur Website

1. Copywriting

   • Write Better, More Specific Copy, Give people what they want and they'll come and get it, use keywords that people are looking for in your text - these keywords must relate to your website and it's content
     
     

2. Links

   • Make it Easy for People to Link to You, by providing usefull information on your site people will link to you without you asking them
     
     

3. Networking

   • Done right, a well built network of contacts, friends and like-minded website oweners can seriously help you get the link love you need, both directly and indirectly
     
     

Those of us who have been in the SEO business for a period of time know how much more competitive it is these days as compared to a few years ago. The number of webpages that have been indexed by search engines has increased exponentially in past years. If thats not enough, a good portion of site owners and webmasters know just enough about SEO to be dangerous. In the past, most websites had not given a thought to the search engines existance, and when they did, it was only to place some keywords in their Meta tags. Those were the days when anyone who knew even the slightest bit about SEO could easily rank highly in all the major search engines, with very little effort. Even competitive areas were possible with just a little more work than their non-competitive oponents.

These days, it's almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody's searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you're doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day, and gone the next. The problem is magnified for new businesses and new websites. If your site isn't at least a few years old, your SEO efforts will be less likely to provide the results you want. This is one reason why your website optimization should always be seen as a long-term proposition.

As the industry moves on, webmasters, site owners, and SEO's need to shift their focus from that of asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers. After all, it's not high search engine rankings that matter as much as the bottom line. This is the goal of good rankings to ultimately increase the number of visits to your site and to convert them to buying customers who will keep on returning just because your site is so easy to use and informative!

Don't get me wrong, I very much understand why people would love to move their rankings up from #11 to #1 for a highly sought-after and targeted keyword phrase. I'm quite sure it would very much increase their targeted traffic and their sales (assuming they're doing everything else right). My frustration lies in the fact that there are people who believe that somehow an SEO company can magically snap their fingers or wave their magic wands and make it so. As we all know this is NOT the case, and it boils down to how much time, money and effort a person is willing to invest to make the high rankings = bottom line to work for them.

Even though we know a few card tricks, we are not magicians. You can't simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you'd see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

But what does this help you the customer, and what can you do realistically to improve rankings and attract more visitors to your site.

As a start, you can provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage!
This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site.
In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

We live in the age of Information Technology, and note the word "Information", that's what it's all about, people search for information on search engines, and allthough sometimes a very minimalistic site with very little text and lots of fantastically designed graphics look good, there is not a very usefull amount of information being presented, and quite frankly these types of sites do not carry much weight on search engines.

How To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?

Content Content Content!

If your site contains the information people are looking for and all your pages are accessible, your site will be visited, if you SEO it they will come!

Links can help search engine crawlers to find your site and give your site greater visibility in the search results. When returning results for a search, Google in particular combines PageRank (it's view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."