Five easy tips to increase website traffic today
It’s easy to make your website more search engine friendly by making a few simple changes. Learn how to increase your hits and get more traffic on your site.
Increasing traffic on your website doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, there are several things you can check without needing to call in a web developer. The increased traffic can mean increased sales and responses, and a higher ranking in the major search engines. Making a web site search engine friendly is mostly a matter of the content. Let’s look at five things that make a big difference to search engines.
Five Things Search Engines Look For on a Web Site
Content is king when it comes to search engines. The text on the page, its location and formatting have one of the biggest impacts on how search engines rank a web site. The most important information about a web site and the content it offers should be near the top of the page. Search engines treat the content at the top of the page with more importance than text further down a page.
Does the text on the home page of the web site focus on the subject matter of the web site or is the home page full of welcome messages for the visitor? Keep home page text relevant to what the site is about. One mistake site owners make is to add a lengthy greeting at the top of the home page to gain the visitors’ trust. Move that to the bottom of the page or to the “About Us” page and keep the home page text tightly relevant to the site’s purpose and intent.
How to Use Keywords to Increase Hits
Meta Tags are also keywords that search engines use to classify and find sites. The Meta tags are hidden at the top of the page in HTML code. It is possible for anyone to see the Meta tags for a web site by using the browser to look at the page source. The Meta tags are near the top of the document code and have the word Meta just before a list of words, usually separated by commas. Check to see if the words are relevant to your site and include the company name, the owner’s name, and all relevant spellings of the product or service on the web site.
Image ALT tags are often overlooked by web developers but are important to search engines. They are simple to add to existing web pages and require no re-coding of a page. Often the image just needs to be clicked on in the software program used to design the web site, and the ALT for the image will appear so text can be entered. If there is an image of a park, for example, adding the name of the park in the Alt Tag for the image will increase the search engine rank when web searchers enter that park name in the search box of the browser. Without that tag, the image draws no attention from the search engine.
And lastly, the title of the page is important. The title of a page shows at the top of the browser window. Each page on a web site has its own title and should reflect the company and purpose of the page. If the title reads “page 2” search engines are not going to pay much attention, but if the title reads “Flying Forms PDF Design” this will help search engines know what the site and that page are about. Check each page on your web site to ensure the titles are relevant and detailed.
Making web sites search engine friendly isn’t luck or magic. Getting increased search engine results is a recipe that’s easy to follow when you know what to look for. It’s easy to overlook little things that can boost web site traffic when running a business, but the content is king when search engines look at your website.