Three Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

The Internet is a giant research tool.  Your customers are becoming more and more savvy as each day goes by, researching products, features, benefits and of course prices.  If you aren’t taking advantage of that trend, you’re missing out.

SEO

One of the best ways to build more traffic to your website is to take advantage of search engine optimization.  Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your website for keywords that your customers are using every day when they do their research. 

Optimizing your website design is a good place to start.  Make sure your website is clear and concise, and every visitor understands just where they are (with your branding and logo) and isn’t cluttered with useless boxes or animations.

Each page on your site should target a single keyword or keyphrase.  Make sure you have a nice headline (with your keyword in it, of course) and your copy for that page includes the keyword a few times.

Don’t overdo it, though.  The copy should still be in ‘normal English’ and not marketer-speak.

Content

One of the best things you can do for your website is to add a blog.  And I don’t mean your daily diary of what you eat and how your Mom is doing.  I mean real meaty content – things that are affecting your industry and answer questions that your customers always ask.  The kind of stuff that makes you sound like an expert.

Why?

Because you’ll sound like an expert.  And people love dealing with experts.

There are probably a hundred or a thousand people right now that know what you know about your industry.  But I’d be willing to bet that less than a handful of them are leveraging that expertise online.

There’s a huge harvest of customers out there just looking for a solution to a problem, and you can be the one that solves it for them.  Writing a weekly blog post that answers a question you hear all the time will not only portray you as the expert, but it will also create links from other websites back to yours.  And every link is like a vote.

Video

The last thing that you can do to get more traffic is to start dabbling in the world of video.  Did you know that the number two search engine isn’t Yahoo!, Bing, or AOL?  It’s YouTube.

If I were to ask my kids today to go look something up online, there’s a good chance they’d go to YouTube to start looking.

Nearly 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day.  While that seems like a lot, there is still only a small amount of videos that are actually optimized for certain keywords and keyphrases.  And Google is working hard to optimize those videos with use of voice recognition software.

Between Google’s voice recognition and your brief description of the video when you upload it, you’ll rank in the search engines quick.  And with Google’s new universal search, your video will not only show up as a search result, but it could also potentially push a competitors’ website off the first page – giving you even more traffic.

Summary

The smart use of search engine optimization techniques, creating quality content and video will thrust your website traffic past your competitors in no time.