SEO – 5 Dead-Simple Tips to Help You Increase Your Organic Traffic

Here are the 5 dead-simple tips to help you increase your organic traffic and get you started with SEO. Get these basics right, and you will surely experience a spike in your organic traffic.

#1 You Need Better Content

We’ve been banging on that drum for a while now, but guess what? Content is still very much the key ingredient to a successful SEO strategy and a successful marketing strategy for that matter.

One mistake I see people make time and time again is focusing too much on keywords. Since the dawn of online search, marketers have abused keywords in an ill-considered effort to manipulate the search engines’ algorithms. Unfortunately, this ‘clever manoeuvre’ will almost always result in more harm than good for your site, and this is the last thing you want.

If you think keywords first, you are likely to over-optimise your content and end up getting penalised as a result.

Remember, you are creating content for humans, not search engines. It’s important to include keywords and phrases on your pages and throughout your content, however your content should ultimately be informative and meaningful, engaging and offer value to the reader. Have this in mind the next time you are writing content for your site.

Plus, longer content will be loved more than shorter content and can rank for far more long tail phrases that often convert better than the more obvious keywords.

#2 Get the Page Title Right

As you would expect, the page title tells both visitors and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. It is displayed in the search results so make sure your title is unique and descriptive of the content that follows.

The key here is to get the balance between an interesting, witty and appealing to the visitor title and a title that is easy to get picked up by bots and has all the right keywords.

As a rule of thumb, try to keep the title short and descriptive to the content of the page. Avoid lengthy titles and stuffing them with one too many keywords.

#3 Don’t Overlook Meta Descriptions

The meta-description is the bit of information below the link of a search result that describes the content of your website/webpage to the user. If you don’t write one yourself, Google will automatically choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visible text.

Try to write all pages’ meta descriptions yourself so that you can ensure they contain keywords whilst being enticing enough for the user to click on that particular link. According to Google ‘Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice’. In fact, you might even want to think of meta descriptions as free advertising. It’s basically an opportunity to get your message out each time your listing is displayed.

Meta descriptions should be no longer than 156 characters and incorporate one or two of the keywords used in the page’s title. The meta description is a chance for you to convey why someone should click-through and visit your website.

Without a Meta description you are in danger of making your content look low quality and suffering at the hands of Google’s Panda algorithm.

#4 Improve the Structure of Your URLs

URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator and is the online address to a resource on the Internet. You can improve your traffic and SEO by tweaking your URLS. Make them more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords.

Your URL will be listed alongside the page title and the meta description in the search results, and visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few if any recognizable words.

For example, the URL https://www.intouchcrm.com/10-small-business-predictions-2015/ carries all the important information necessairy for a visitor to figure out what this page is about and the content it contains. By contrast, this URL https://www.intouchcrm.com/1595625/jsdv5wv6  is an absolute mystery and maybe even off-putting for the potential visitor. Which one would you click on?

Structure your links in a way that is straight-forward and easy to understand, like a well-organized folder system. You can and should use keywords from the page content. This will make it easier for Google to index your page and for the user to see what the page is all about.

#5 Try a Simple Link Building Strategy

An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites. The latest Google algorithm update adds more weight to pages that link to outside sources. Link to well known industry leaders whenever you need reliable sources. Depending on your area of business, you can quote well-known authority websites in your content and link back to them, or include a link a relevant article of theirs.

Along with that, make sure that there are plenty of external links leading back to your website. You can achieve this by guest blogging or even writing to the webmaster of well-respected sites and asking them to feature you on their website. However, beware that posting your link on too many non-respectable sites, also known as link-farms will ultimately result in a Google penalty.

As a small business owner I know that SEO is a critical to your business’ success. Hopefully these five easy-to-implement tips will help you lay the foundations to a successful SEO strategy and make it possible for your website to attract more organic traffic. There is a lot to learn when it comes to SEO and the search engine scene is constantly changing but these are the basics that will help you get going in the right direction.

Got more ideas? Any tips we’ve missed? Add them in the comments below!