In order to drive traffic to your website, you first have to optimize the page so that it will rank higher in related search engine results. After all, no one wants to be hundreds or even thousands of results deep, when someone finally plugs in the magic keyword that’s supposed to lead them to your site. However, you also need to create the kind of content that your visitors will be inclined to share on their own social media pages. In effect, this provides you with free advertising assistance from some of the very same people you’re trying to attract in the first place.
Here are a few tips for those who are wondering how this is done:
Choose Your Keywords Carefully
Without the proper keywords, your page has little chance of ever attracting traffic. Although Google’s criteria for ranking websites has changed considerably from the early days, it’s still ultimately about words. Search engines are simply trying to match up the words people type into the search bar with words that appear in the content of millions of web pages, in an attempt to deliver exactly what the seeker is looking for.
As a website owner, your job is to figure out which keywords people are actually using and spread them throughout your content. Remember that just because you can think up a handful of words that are related to the main subject doesn’t mean that they’re the most popular search terms. If people aren’t using those particular words, your page will never turn up in their results. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great way to analyze potential keywords, to see how popular they really are and compare them with some of their variations, that may or may not be better choices. Just make sure that the words you do choose are still relevant to the content you’re providing.
Know Where to Place Your Keywords
As important as it is to come up with the right keywords, where you place them is just as important. The title of the article is easily the most important place, since this is what tells both the readers and the search engines what the content is about. Additionally, there’s a good chance that anyone who links back to the article will use the title (with your keywords) in their hyperlink. You should also use them around three to five times within the article body, including a few of their variations, to make the text appear more natural.
Create Content – Quality
In years past, website owners were able to manipulate the ranking systems by flooding their pages with often nonsensical content that was overstuffed with popular keywords. Major search engines like Google caught onto this and began to change the way they analyzed web pages, in an effort to clean things up and provide better content. Consider including lists, statistics, graphs and video to make your content more useful and interesting. You can also get creative with infographics, to give your data a bit more visual appeal and remember to throw in some humor, now and then. The idea is to get people to share your content and create links back to it that will improve your rankings. Check out what some of your competitors are posting and try to “one-up” them, by offering some added value.
Promote Your Content Aggressively
Finally, every successful website owner knows that in order to maximize their web presence, they need to make every effort to promote their own content. It doesn’t take much time to set up pages on the various social media networks and you can reach many people this way, from all around the world. Joining special groups on Facebook will allow you to network with people of similar interests and Twitter allows you to post links to your content that can reach an equally large audience.
No matter what you’re selling or sharing on the Web, driving traffic to your website does not have to be difficult and it works the same way for everyone. Careful thought should always go into the content you post, from the text and keywords to the graphics and videos. If you can create value for your audience on a page that is easily found in a basic search, you simply stand a better chance of getting those visitors to share your content and boost your rankings.
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