How to Increase Website Traffic

The Holy Grail of internet marketing is learning how to increase website traffic. If noone is actually landing on your pages and finding them, you are going to have a really hard time getting sales conversions. I’m going to briefly hit on a few quick traffic building tips without giving away the entire SEO playbook. I’ll also quickly show you how to do some quick interlinking so that you can get more traffic to your HubPages.

Be Innovative – invent your own traffic generation methods

If you have got yourself into the internet marketing game then you are a pioneer. Yes, you are actually a pioneer on the ground floor of a new era of marketing and money making. What does this mean? It means there are countless methods to increase targeted website traffic that haven’t even been thought of yet! The landscape is changing daily and to keep up, it is actually best to stay ahead of the curve by creating methods that are new and fresh.

The first thing I found out was that many “Gurus” in SEO are actually just really good at marketing SEO and traffic generation products. I began testing for myself what many were saying and was able to debunk several “Google Myths” that circulate the field. Don’t take anyone’s word as fact, unless they can show you proof and actual data that they have tested it and came to consistent conclusions.

Traffic Building Fundamentals

Everyone is always talking about backlinks, backlinks, and more backlinks. Somewhere along the line onsite was thrown out the window as many internet marketers went into backlink building automation mode using brute force to rank high. Backlinks are a huge part of the equation but a better optimized website can beat out a site with thousands more links. I have proven this over and over taking many sites to the top 3 in Google and several to #1 on competitive keywords.

SEO Content Writing – a quick guide to increase website traffic

The first thing you want to do is learn how to write well crafted articles using a very similar format each time. Let’s take a look at which factors effect ranking the most. I am going to list them in order of importance.

URL – laser target your URL to the keyword increase traffic rankings

Make sure the URL for your article contains the keyword you are looking to rank for. Chop out all the excess words that you don’t need Google to see. Many articles directories don’t give you control of this but Hubpages does allow you to edit your URL. If you have a WordPress blog you can edit the URL and there are also free plugins that will take out non relevant words. Above anything, get your own website domain with your keyword in the domain. This actually gives you such an unfair advantage and many internet marketers are buying up domains faster than ever.

If you want to rank for a long tail or short tail make sure to trim the URL down to just the keyword. This improves the keyword density in the URL. The URL is the first thing that Google sees to determine keyword relevancy. If the URL is 8 words and your keyword is only 4 words then the density is only 50% which means it is important, but the other words must also be important.

For example – the title of this Hub is How to Increase Website Traffic, but I trimmed the URL on the Hub page to just this —>http://hubpages.com/hub/IncreaseWebsite-Traffic

I want that Hubpage article to rank in the top 20 for the keyword ‘increase website traffic’ so I’m not going to worry about the ‘how to’ in the title. If I want to rank high for that I would create another page for a more optimized focus on that keyword (which is what I have done on my main website here – I already have an optimized page for ‘increase website traffic‘ so now I want another keyword). Longtails and sometimes rank without even trying because noone is competing for the phrases by building targeted anchor text backlinks.

Title

The next factor is the title of your page. This is going to be the title you give your Hubpage or blog article and it is very necessary to include your keyword in the title. Include the keyword preferably in the beginning of the title, but in this case using the prefix words ‘How to’ shouldn’t hurt, it actually would be better optimized for ‘increase website traffic‘ if I made the title – Increase Website Traffic – Guaranteed Traffic Tips.

It would be even better optimized if the title was just ‘increase website traffic‘ – but that is a boring title and many people won’t click on it. You have to walk the fine line of optimization for SEO, yet at the same time generating interest in a human so they will click on your articles!

Title Tags (H1,H2,H3)

These tags are bold headers in your article. You can see them in this very article. Try to include your keywords in at least 1 H2 and H3 tag in your Hubs. You can use variations of your keywords and long tails as well. These are anchor points that the eye sees as important and the search engines actually see these the same. Make sure that the anchor points stress your keywords for the Search Engines, and include something interesting to keep your readers attention.

Content – the web traffic king

They say “content is king”. I’m not sure who “they” are but “they” are correct, although I would add one caveat. Content with SEO in mind is king when it comes to building traffic. There is a lot of very low quality material out there that consists of anywhere from just a few sentences to only a couple hundred words.

If you want an article to rank high in search engines on a medium difficulty or competitive keyword it is very important to keep your articles to a minimum of 400 words. Articles that go up to 600 to 1,000 words when properly written with SEO fundamentals get a huge boost over articles that are only a few hundred words that have been on the web for years. Rise above your competitors by writing articles that are slightly longer and better optimized.

This is the quickest and easiest way to get your Hubs ranking high. Then add a few social bookmarks to the Hub and you have traffic and rankings! This same technique should be used on any of your free accounts like Blogspot and other Web 2.0 properties like Hubpages. Interlink your articles to create a mini-network of relevant content. Link them together with long tails and vary the text to create a natural looking information bubble that gains authority with search engines like Google.

Now before you sit down and try to write your next article I want you to know that you should not really be thinking about these factors until they are second nature to you. Write your article from YOU first letting your personality and own words flow naturally. Then after you write the article you can go through and make these SEO edits. It’s really important to continue writing like a person first, and SEO second.

The better you get the more cognizant you will be of these traffic building SEO factors and they will start to be included without thinking about it. I still go back to blog articles I wrote months ago and re-optimize them a bit using new things I learned. I also look back at my oldest articles and laugh sometimes at how making a couple changes drives it from page 10 to page 1.

I just whipped this article together to get it up but will come back a couple times to do edits for optimization. Don’t stress over it too much, it’s better to get your content online first rather than to not submit it at all because you want to do the SEO editing. Get it up first while the ideas are fresh in your head for your article. Then go back and optimize during those times of the day when your brain just won’t do anything creative. I save some of that work for late at night when my brain is fried and I just can’t write very well. Everyone has their own circadium rhythm though, so it’s just best to work with your body and do certain tasks during the time you do them best.

Keywords

I’ve talked about keywords in this article a little bit but let’s touch on this briefly. You may have heard the phrase “keyword density” in the SEO world. This is simply the amount of times your keyword is used in relation to the overall amount of words. The simplest way to make sure you have enough keyword density is to put your keyword in the first sentence and last sentence of the article for primary importance. Then use it once in the middle of the article.

For short articles of about 300-400 words this is usually enough. However, you can get a little more boost by using some longtails of your trunk keyword. Use them naturally as this LSI (latent semantic indexing) with synonyms and phrases can help you pull more traffic. There are a lot of LSI articles out there but everyone makes it much more complicated than it really is.

Go to Google and do a search using the ‘Wonder Wheel’ function and see which phrases it finds relevant or depending on your settings you may see “Searches related to” at the bottom of your screen. Pick a couple of these phrases out and use them in your article. To really boost your Hubs create another article with that keyword as the focus and have both of the Hubs reciprocally link to each other using the other articles keyword as the anchor text.

Tools to Increase Traffic

There are only a few tools that I recommend to increase website traffic. Most of the products out there are gimmicks that have brilliant and experienced marketing behind them. It’s designed to pull at your emotions and get you to buy. If something is claiming that you don’t have to work hard but you’ll be able to make lots of money then you might want to rethink the purchase. Anything that is really worth anything still requires hard work.

I was able to quit my job this year to become a full time internet marketer and SEO consultant, but it took hundreds of hours of work to create the base of income that allowed me to do so. Learn the fundamentals first and then learn how to use tools. Most internet marketers fail because they buy all the shiny tools but never actually learn the fundamentals to understand how this all works.

Having the false impression that a few automation tools is all you need to make money gets many people off to the wrong start. After a few hundred dollars invested, a couple weeks time, and no money to show for it they give up thinking it was all a scam.

How to Increase Website Traffic