To drive visitors to your website is the primary goal of all domains. Whether it is to share an idea or sell some goods, traffic is what a webpage is all about. With search engine optimization, you can ensure that more visitors are coming to your site for the content you provide. What step-by-step methods can you employ to ensure your SEO success?
1. The Website – You have a website ready to be optimized. All the designing and color schemes have been chosen and you are ready to generate some traffic.
2. Content – The content within your website will need to have specific keywords and phrases that search engines can pick up. The content will also need to be relevant to the keywords for the best results in Google. Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past and Google’s new algorithms will spot it.
3. Sitemap – The sitemap can be created a number of ways. While you can create the sitemap page by coding each link to every page in your site by hand, it is probably easier to use sites like XML-sitemaps.com. If you are using Joomla, WordPress, or other CMS, there are add-ons you can install that will create these for you.
4. Google Submission – Create an account at Google’s Webmaster Tools. Here, you can add your website to be crawled by Google and submit your sitemap’s location. Usually, Google will crawl your website within a few days depending on the content and size of your site.
5. Google Analytics – Create an account at Google Analytics for tracking information. Once you add the analytics code to your website, you can view how each visitor reacts to your website, from where they came from, what pages are most popular, and so on. For Joomla, WordPress, or other CMS, an add-on can be installed to do this for you, and all you will need is the analytic account number to put into it.
6. Bing & Yahoo – As these two are Google’s main competitors, it only makes sense that you should sign up for a free account with Bing and Yahoo as well. Although the tools aren’t as robust as Google’s, they provide great analytical data pertaining to the functionality of your site with Bing and Yahoo respectively.
7. Backlinks – Once your search engine accounts are created, start registering with free forum sites regarding your website’s niche. You’ll want to sign up with those that allow you to put the link to your site in your signature. By helping others in those forums with their discussions, you will be creating backlinks for search engines to gauge popularity. The more links you have, the better you look to the search engines.
8. Business Directories – After creating a few forum accounts, its time to look at business directories. Many of these are free to sign up with and can provide additional backlinks as well as traffic generation from live clicks.
9. Facebook – After setting up a few accounts at business directories, it’s time to focus on the meat of social media. Facebook accounts are free to establish and can do wonders for a website. Not only is it a backlinking opportunity, but constant updates to your profile can keep your fans and patrons feeling like they are a part of your website.
10. YouTube – Again, this is another great exercise in backlinks and traffic generation. It is very easy to get a few videos up pertaining to your website’s purpose without even having a camera. Software such as Cam Studio will record everything on your computer screen, perfect for presentations and “how-to” videos.
11. Other Social Media – Although Facebook and YouTube are the two biggest names in social media, there are other areas that your website could become a part of. Performing a search for these sites in any search engine can yield several places perfect for your website to become a part of.
12. Content, Again – Keeping current and fresh content on your site can keep visitors coming back for more at a future date while enticing new ones to visit. There is no such thing as too much content as long as it pertains to the website’s niche and purpose.
13. Analysis – Keep a constant watch of the analytical data of your website. The tools provided by Google, Bing, and Yahoo can show you areas that need improving or what content yields the best results. These tools are free, so why not use them?
An instant boost of traffic doesn’t happen overnight, in most cases. Many SEO companies will guarantee results in 90 days from the finishing touches. However, the boost of traffic you seek could happen within that time. The traffic you’ll receive is subjective to the effort you put into your own search engine optimization practices.
Author Bio:
Ken Myers is the founder & contributor for http://www.longhornleads.com/. He frequently researches and writes about a variety of topics like education, Technology, Health and many more.
Thanks for this useful Post. I have read all thirteen steps for Successful SEO. I have seen these tips before. These are great Tips I realy like your points toward the SEO as well as it’s a great platform to promote the business
SEO is pretty much trivial and straightforward. It is very similar to blogging – there are no shortcuts, on the other hand consistency and good discipline are absolute necessity.