Websites, blogs and social media pages make up the bulk of a business’s web identity and contribute significantly to the public perception of the company. Everyone agrees that maintaining an interactive and informational web
William J. Corbett, Jr.
presence is a marketing necessity. Business websites let people find your business and learn about the products and/or services you offer, and a blog plays a similar but different role positioning you as an expert in your field. As entrepreneurs, owners and professionals, we spend tremendous amounts of time, effort and money designing, maintaining and updating websites and blogs. But if your sites are not attracting traffic, all of your hard work is for naught. So after you just spent the entire holiday season trying to avoid traffic, please read below for a few SEO and others tips from Corbett Public Relations that you can use to drive traffic to your website or blog. All these tips are free and easy to implement.
Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Website or Blog
1 – List your business website on specific search engines where you want to be. Google, Yahoo and Bing cannot find your website unless its information is submitted directly to them on their site. There are also free services that can be used to submit sites to multiple search engines; try Submit It! and Scrub The Web.
2 – Research Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Search engines aggregate results pages based on certain criteria. They search web pages for relevant keywords, titles, headings and meta tags; meta tags are unseen descriptions embedded into HTML code of a website that provide search engines with information about a particular site. Optimizing your website is the single most important action you can take to drive traffic to your site. For example, make sure every page, picture and file on your website is tagged individually with your unique keywords and phrases in the title, title tag, meta keywords, and meta description.
3 – Your blog entries should highlight your expertise on a specific topic or field. Posts should be made regularly and comment on current trends and issues relating to that subject. Blog entries should be full of keyword-rich content; useful or topical content is the number one reason people will visit. Include pictures and links to add dimension and make the entry more appealing and likely to be read.
4 – Promote your website and blog. Make sure your website and blog links are included in your e-mail signature, on your business card and on any marketing materials you produce. Network locally and remind people to read your blog for timely, useful information. Build an e-mail list from current customers, prospects and contacts and send them regular updates.
5 – Keep websites and blog formats simple and clean. The page has to be appealing to the reader’s eye and the key information should be visible on the page without having to scroll down. Don’t clutter the page with unneeded links, subscription buttons and RSS feed links. When the page is well-organized, easy-to-follow and rich in content, it will be attractive to readers and web traffic will increase.
6 – Utilize free press release submission sites and other business listings sites to increase your web presence and increase traffic to your site. You can submit your keyword-rich, back-linked press release directly on these sites for free.
7 – Incorporate a share button into your blog page. You want interested readers to be able to share your fascinating, relevant and timely blog entries with all their friends and contacts on their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. This function can increase the exposure of your blog exponentially.
The individuals who we know and work with that use these approaches and techniques are showing increased numbers of visitors to their websites and more subscribers to their blogs. We welcome your comments and questions about SEO and online marketing.
Bill Corbett, Jr.
wjcorbett@corbettpr.com
Great post as I have alot of knowledge in multiple areas and would love to monetize this but don’t have the programming skills to build a web site or update it. Do you have examples of successful blogs or info on how I can make a successful blog. Thanks so much.