SEO Services Increase Your Targeted Traffic
There are two kinds of traffic on the Internet… paid traffic and FREE traffic.
Paid traffic is great. I’ll put in 50 cents to get a dollar back all day long. (Call me, if you want to know how to do that.)
But free traffic is better. 🙂
Getting Free Traffic to Your Website
There are three kinds of free traffic:
- traffic from links that point to your site
- traffic from users typing your address into their browser
- traffic from search engines
The art and science of getting free traffic from search engines is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
A lot has been written about SEO over the years. Many of the techniques being taught and practiced out there are oversimplified or outdated. Worse, some can actually get your site penalized in the eyes of the search engines. You don’t want that.
What You Can Do to Improve Your Search Engine Results
SEO Rule #1
This is simple, will never change, and will never fail you: Give the search engines what they want. And what they want is a great user experience, and fresh, unique, quality content.
For sure, you should be engaged in an ongoing effort to post regular updates to your site.
As a side benefit, the more quality content you have on your site, the more likely it is that you will attract inbound links from other sites. These can bring targeted traffic, but also, inbound links are considered as “votes” by the search engines, as an indicator of how important or how good your site is. And that translates to a better search ranking.
But also, your site needs to be easy to navigate, easy to read, and reasonably fast, on a mobile device as well as on a desktop. This is what is called “UX,” or “user experience.”
SEO Rule #2: Keyword Research
You simply must know what your prospective customers are searching for, and in particular, what they are searching for when they have their wallets out and they are ready to “buy.” This is called keyword research. There are many free tools available for doing keyword research. Using these tools does require some knowledge and effort on your part. What is a broad match vs. an exact match and which should I target? Which keywords indicate that the customer is ready to buy? How do I maximize my results as a local business in the search engines?
SEO Rule #3: On-Page Factors
Do not neglect on-page factors. Use the headings, use the title tag, set up a good internal linking structure, use the right names and alt tags for your images, on and on. Oh, the meta keywords? Those are almost entirely useless. If someone told you that was the golden ticket to winning the search engine game… you need to call us.
Write for your human audience but always be mindful of the need to sprinkle your keywords around your page. Use a good SEO utility to measure your keyword density and give you guidance in this area.
SEO Rule #4: Off-Page Factors
Maximize your off-page factors. In other words, the afore-mentioned links from other sites. These links should be natural, and the anchor text may be keyword-optimized, but not too much. In fact, your “link profile” should include backlinks with a variety of anchor texts, similar to what would be naturally occurring. This is a tricky and evolving area. Google is getting better and better–and more aggressive–about identifying links that are not naturally-occurring. So tread VERY carefully here.