Rush Hour: Get The Most Traffic For Your Site With These Essential SEO Tips

For new business and websites, SEO can seem like a dark art. Often, it’s overlooked as people make the mistake of assuming that good quality content is all you need to bring users to your site. Whilst this is one ingredient, you have to play the game of SEO to get ahead of your competitors. This list will take you through the top tips for effective SEO - you’ll see more traffic on your site and ultimately greater profits for your business.

1) Feel The Need For Speed

Your page load times are crucial to your SEO as well as to customer care in general. In 2020, web users are more impatient than ever before and across desktop and mobile devices customers now expect instantaneous loading speeds. The slower your page load times, the more likely people are to lose interest and click away, damaging your ranking and losing you business: beheaded by a double edged sword.

If your site loads promptly, however, users will keep coming back and search engine algorithms will take notice of your site's popularity. As web users frequent your functional site, you’ll watch your rankings rise.

2) Quality Content Is The Key

When you’re working on your SEO strategy, all your effort will be in vain if your site’s content isn’t up to scratch. Good quality content provides the foundation for a functional site, and allows you to go about optimizing everything else to secure that front page ranking.

People tend to be looking for quick answers to questions, so ensure your text is readable at a glance. “Well structured articles broken up by logical headers will allow web users to scan your site and access the information they need,” says Andre Gustaman, SEO expert at Boomessays and Writing Services. “Nobody wants to work harder than they have to!” Avoiding duplicate content is also essential - unique content makes your site valuable to users and search engines will recognize this. If your content is duplicated elsewhere on the web - especially on sites with higher authority than your own - your ranking is going to suffer.

3) Optimize Your Keywords

Keywords bring users to your site and so they cannot be ignored. Researching the most valuable keywords allows you to target your content, making you easily searchable. The more traffic your site receives the higher you’ll rise up the rankings.

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool that lets you track popular keywords and plan your content around what people are searching for. For example, if you notice that “New York coffee house” is getting more searches than anything else you can use this to guide your content strategy. You’ll tap into the current trends in keywords and boost your site’s rankings.

4) On-Page Optimization

When you’re starting out building websites, it’s easy to think that they all look the same: content on the page. Yet behind the scenes of a website there are many details that can work towards an optimized digital strategy, and missing out on these details can hurt your rankings. Including meta descriptions, header tags and URLS all have a big effect on your rankings.

A few tips include using H2 and H3 tags to indicate the structure of your site’s content: this will enable search engines to distinguish between headings and the body of your text. Ensure URLs are descriptive and uncomplicated, and if you change a URL leave the old one active with a redirect so you don’t lose out. Keywords are relevant in on-page optimization too as you can include them in the meta descriptions of your site, making sure search engines prioritise them in results.

5) Link Building

Incoming links to your site prove that other web users value your content and want to share it, so links are an important element of SEO. Considered “off-site” SEO - because links have to be found elsewhere on the web - this is a good strategy to start with right away.

However, the days of link farming are long past as search engine algorithms work to distinguish between good links and bad, spammy ones. “Building a network of links naturally through outreach and reciprocation across similar sites and blogs will ensure that your links are valuable”, says Charlotte French, blogger at Top Essay Writing Services and Dissertation Service. “Quality is more important than quality when it comes to links.”

6) Social Media

Social media is a fantastic tool for promoting your site amongst new audiences and bringing more traffic to your domain, ultimately boosting your rankings. No matter what niche you’re in, there’s a social platform for you.

If your brand is concentrated on a creative output, especially if there’s a visual element, then Pinterest and Instagram are fantastic places to build a following. Users that discover you on these platforms can be led to your site through promotions and links. If you’re in the service industry then Q and A site Quora can be a way to interact with a wider audience. Become an active member of that community by answering industry-relevant questions, and build your brand across multiple platforms.

7) Functionality Across Platforms

As web users diversify across tablets, other mobile devices and desktops, the variety of screens and CPUs that your site’s visitors may be using multiplies. There’s no point providing high quality content if it disappears off the end of a user’s screen.

Test your site on multiple devices and ensure that the site scales for different screen sizes. For mobile users it can be useful to have a menu bar that shifts to the side of the screen to maximize functionality. If users are comfortable on your site no matter what the device they’re using, you’ll boost your traffic and your rankings.

Logging Off

SEO is essential to consider even when you’re just starting out as from day one search engine algorithms will be assessing your site. With great quality content and the behind-the-scenes tweaks you can bring more traffic to your site. SEO can be make or break for a business when attention is at a premium. Don’t overlook the value of SEO.

Katherine Rundell is a blogger at Best Essay Writing Services and writer for Assignment Help. She’s inspired by the power of digital marketing to reach wide audiences and works to offer SEO solutions for new brands. She also writes for the Academized review blog.