How To Get Increased Website Traffic With On-Site SEO

On-Site SEO won't win you increased website traffic for the most competitive search terms, but it does help with some search engines, such as yahoo, at least at the current time. And there are other benefits to having the basics of search engine optimization covered on your website. It helps the search bots determine what your site is about, which in turn helps them serve up more relevant contextual advertising.

And, of course, for the less competitive search terms, the 'low hanging fruit', it can still help improve your rank, and therefore your traffic.

But there's another facet to on-site SEO, and that's the relevance that it conveys to visitors looking for information around a certain topic. If they can easily see their keywords, in your titles, and scattered throughout the article - in a meaningful way that doesn't abdicate basic grammar - then they are more likely to read, or at least scan, your article.

And by having the keywords in the title, and in the file name, it helps persuade visitors that your page is relevant to their search query, leading to a higher click through to your website from the natural search results.

The key to remember is that you're interested in making your site more user-friendly, and more search-bot friendly. Get the basics covered, and don't worry too much about every little detail.
 
Don't forget to read the article on off-page factors, as these play an increasingly important role in getting increased website traffic through natural search results for all of the major search engines - especially Google.

Keywords

Be sure to include your keywords or key phrases on your page. You don’t want to go overboard, but you will want your page title to be very descriptive.

Tip - Try using similar phrases and related keywords in your article as well. Search engines are rewarding natural writing more, and Google in particular has started to incorporate latent semantic indexing into it's ranking algorithm. This may sound really complex and 'techie', but it's not. There's a great article on it here: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml

I'll cover more tips and ideas about this and other topics in the next article. Here, I'll just discuss the title tag, as it's important to try and get it right for a few reasons, not least because this is what may determine whether a searcher clicks through to your website.

Try and convey the meaning and benefits of your article, in a way that naturally uses the main keyword or keyword phrase you'd like to rank on. Think of the article title as the way you'd think of writing an ad - you've only got a short while to catch a potential visitor's eye. Try and answer the question 'What's in it for me' (the reader, not you :-))

Here are some examples. Note the two examples below appeal to both the reader and the search engines. The better title conveys a lot more meaning about the website.

Bad SEO Title: “Why I’m Having a Crummy Day”
Better SEO Title: “The Effects of Acne on Self Esteem”

Bad SEO Title: “Lessons I Learned on the Subway on a Trip to the Zoo”
Better SEO Title: “Disciplining Your Child in Public”

Assuming these articles are written with the same content, the search engines will understand the “Better SEO Title” more.

How Do You Find Keywords?

There are tools you can use to find keywords that are being searched.

• Wordtracker – Provides a tool that displays the number of people searching for a term, as well as the competition. Wordtracker offers a free trial so you can test their service.

This is the tool I use to get keywords, and I use KRA to organise and sort through my results. I cannot recommend wordtracker highly enough. You find search terms people are actually searching on, and I have almost always found my increased website traffic was higher than the number they specify for a given term.

Despite so many people using wordtracker, there are still search terms that offer a good ratio of traffic and a lower number of people supplying websites for that term. And even though some of the numbers may seem very low - say, 5, or 20 - for the very low competition keywords, this can still amount to much more traffic than that. I have received hundreds of visitors a month on keywords that have a lower visitor demand on wordtracker.

So, if you're using this tool, don't be afraid to pick search terms that have 5 to 20 people searching on them. You'd be surprised how many people you may end up getting on that page. And once you multiply this by increasing the number of your webpages, you will have a very decent amount of increased website traffic.

KRA is an easy to use tool that will allow you to cut-and-paste your wordtracker emails into the program, and then you can filter the results based on the minimum number of people searching for a given term, and the maximum number of websites supplying that term.

It is a great time saver and really allows you to find the hidden gold quickly, as well as eliminate terms that are too competitive to bother with. It really saves the time of having to wade through hundreds and hundreds of search terms to find what you're looking to use for your site. I can't recommend it highly enough. This, and wordtracker, is exactly what I use to get increased website traffic.

• SEO Elite – As of this writing, this website offers a free ecourse about Search Engine Optimization from one of the leading SEO Experts, Brad Callen. The software itself is highly recommended by many of the top Internet Marketers.

However, if you're looking at buying site link analysis software, I would recommend you check out Optilink. It's recommended by the people at Planet Ocean, a highly respectted SEO ezine that I have subscribed to.

• Overture – This free resource will give you ideas for keywords. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles but is a good place to start.

Be careful with overture - keywords might be out of order. And you'll get some junk terms as well. It's nowhere near as good as wordtracker, though it is free. But I would highly recommend using wordtracker. You can start with 1 day (which actually gives you 3), and do enough research for one site, enough to last you months and months!

Where to include your keywords

Now that you have an idea of which keywords you’re using, you’ll want to stay consistent.

Meta Tags: Here’s where we start to lose people. Hang in there. We promise to make this simple.

If you peek into the html of a new page you’ve created, you’ll see something like this  –

<title>New Page 1</title>

All you need to do is to replace the text between the two <title> words with YOUR title.

For instance:

<title>Dalmatian Training Tips for Firefighters</title>

The other tag in the meta section that you should really alter is the Description tag. It will look something like this and fall immediately after the <title> tag.
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Add something here">

Simply add a short description of the page in there in plain English, and include the words you used in your title tag.

For instance:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Firefighters, we have free tips for training your Dalmatian.">

That’s it.

A word on meta tags - Don't sweat about it! The title tag has some importance with SEO, nowhere near what it used to. This is because on-page factors were too easy to manipulate by people and the search results filled up with meaningless spam results.

But try and put something in, remembering that this is what people will generally see in the search results. You want your primary keyword included, and you want it to speak to potential visitors in some way. Don't forget your visitors! Give them a reason to click through to your website.

Now, in your content, be sure to use <h1> tags around your title. It’ll look like this:

<h1>Dalmatian Training Tips for Firefighters</h1>

There is a ton of information we could get into, but those are the quick and essential tips you should know about making your pages search engine friendly, which is the first step in getting increased website traffic.

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