Tips On How To Get More Traffic With SEO

Building a website without doing something to drive in traffic is like building an office that has no roads leading to it! No matter how beautiful it is, without traffic – no one will see it.

To be successful in building an online presence, you must have both a beautiful, functional website AND get website traffic. For most companies, the fastest, most affordable and most effective way to drive traffic is through search engine optimization (SEO). SEO starts with keyword research.

Identifying Keywords

What words do people use when they are looking for you, your products and services? Your company name is an obvious choice – but those people already know you. What if they don’t know you? How would they find you then?

Start by just guessing. Make sure each of your keyword phrases are at least 2-3 words long. So for our business, we might “guess” our keyword phrases like:

• web development company
• website design
• SEO services
• marketing consulting firm

Once we have some ideas, we can plug those terms into tools like Wordtracker or Google Adwords. These tools will tell us how often those terms are searched and how many people are competing to be found on those terms. You want to find terms with high search and low competition – not that easy to do!

Adding geography really helps. For example, you may never be able to compete on “teeth whitening”—but may for “teeth whitening irvine.”

Too often, we see clients who can be found using their own industry jargon – but not terms that real people use. Ask your clients how they’d search for you.

On-page Optimization

After you learn the relevant keywords for your company, you need to sprinkle these terms throughout your website – in the page titles, in page headings, in the text itself. This part of SEO is called “on-page” optimization and it is only the beginning of SEO. Search engines don’t trust on-page optimization by itself. You also have to incorporate off-page optimization.

Off-page Optimization

Off-page search engine optimization requires getting listed in directories, blogs, and forums that build links back to your site (these are called backlinks). These referral links tell the search engines that your site really is important and relevant. Both the quality and quantity of the inbound links factor into your search engine ranking.

Far too many people think that on-page optimization is enough. They are then sorely disappointed when the phone is not ringing after spending all that time and money optimizing their site.

The problem with off-page optimization is that it is extremely time consuming, confusing and (frankly) boring work. There is no good way to automate this process. We know, because we keep looking for a better way! We have a team of people who do the back-linking by hand, each and every month – because getting to the top of the search engines is an on-going process.

If you aren’t using keyword research in conjunction with on-page and off-page SEO then you are missing out on valuable traffic, leads and sales opportunities. Help your prospects find you online by taking advantage of our new SEO packages that include bonus offers at www.ArtOfWebTraffic.com. Act fast! Offer ends today.