How to Get More Search Engine Traffic to Your Site

Search engine traffic is a very valuable commodity online and finding new ways to increase it is a constant quest for any website owner. Driving traffic to our websites or blogs is an ongoing obsession since without it our sites serve no purpose. When you consider that the vast majority of sites online are there for the purpose of generating a profit it would be fair to say traffic equals money. Therefore finding new ways to make your site more search engine friendly in order to increase your website traffic is much like finding the Holy Grail.
Well not exactly but hopefully you catch my drift.

Let's look at 5 different ways we can better optimize our sites to get more traffic from the search engines without even leaving the site itself.

Page Title

The title of your website is just that, a short and descriptive title telling both the search engines and the site visitors what your website is all about. The title tags are critical because online searches rely upon these tags to be accurate in their description. Usually this tag will be what will appear in the search results so careful consideration must be given to what you put in here. When driving traffic to your website you need to be sure you are representing it accurately.

Meta Description Tags

These tags are used to describe website 'pages' allowing search engines to determine the appropriate or relevant keywords your page should be ranked for. Once again as in the title you should be sure the meta description tags accurately depict what the page is all about and that your keywords are relevant to the content.

Page Headings

Your page heading is actually located on the page itself and is essentially used as to help describe to site visitors what the content of the page is about. Keywords that you are trying to rank for from the page should be used in the page heading.

For instance if your page is about toy dogs as companion pets your heading can be "The Most Adaptable Toy Dog for a Large Family." The content of your page can then describe the breed you are referring to and why it is so adaptable.

Keyword Use

Properly using keywords in your content is a must if your intent is to help search engines find your content easily. Your keyword use should not exceed much more than 3 percent of your total content. For example if your content is 500 words in length and you use 10 keywords your 'keyword density' is 2 percent.

A proper balance needs to be made when using keywords since you do not want to use too many and get penalized by ranking poorly in the search results. On the other hand using too few make your site loses its relevancy to these keywords. A range between 2 and 3 percent is generally recommended.

Link to Other Pages

Linking pages on your website helps site visitors more easily navigate the website or blog. If you have one page that has content related to that of another page on your site using an anchor text link helps to bridge these pages. For the reader this helps them more easily find other content that they may be interested in reading.

This also makes it easier for search engines to 'crawl' your site finding more relevant content that will help to rank your site higher in the listings.

Having a steady flow of search engine traffic is a must for any site that expects to maintain a 'healthy' existence online. Driving traffic to our sites is both a constant effort and process that needs to be put forth monitored and maintained. This however should not be confused with ATTRACTING traffic. By making your site more search engine friendly as we reviewed above you will in fact stead be ATTRACTING your website traffic. This is a VERY good thing for a few reasons. The people you get will be targeted, free, and all with just a little bit of 'one time' effort from you.