Aside from design, one of the most important aspects of a website is driving traffic to it. For some small businesses the entire revenue generation relies on traffic coming to your site. Equally important is the quality of the traffic coming to your site. Although pay-per-click campaigns can be attractive and ad value, here are some simple tips to apply first to help increase site traffic:

1. Productive Keywords

When someone mentions “Search Engine Optimization” or website traffic in general the first thing that often comes to mind is keywords. The thought is often that more is better when in reality the exact opposite is true. In fact, too many keywords is often viewed as spamming to search engines like Google. Focus on 10 keywords that are relevant to the content on that particular web page. You should also spread keywords out through the website vs. trying to stuff them all into the homepage. For example if you own a restaurant, keywords related to the cuisine will have a greater effect on pages related to the menu. Spend some time on Google testing keywords and seeing were your competitors land. You can also use the keyword tool offered by Google Adwords to ensure you are building effective keywords. A productive keyword is one that you should be able to easily insert into your site content. Which brings us to tip #2…

2. Creating Content

Probably even more important than keywords is creating the right content. Traffic generation purely depends upon the content you create for your website. If your content is of good quality then Google will most likely rank it higher every time someone searches on one of your keywords. While creating content insert your top keywords in it. For every 100 words in page content try inserting one keyword. Be sure not to just jam keywords in without it sounding natural in the sentence structure. Google is smarted than you think and can understand your content well enough to know if it’s low quality, which will push you further down the search hierarchy.

3. Backlinks

Often referred to as inbound links, backlinks are an effective tool to drive traffic to your site. The concept is fairly simple, someone else creates a link on their site directing users to your site. You need to build backlinks for your website because Google search engine loves to rank websites with high backlinks. In fact Google bot loves two things one is great content and another is number of backlinks. Good quality backlinks are very important factor to generate traffic. Not all backlinks are of good quality. A quality backlink is one that is relevant to your site. Again using the restaurant example, a quality backlink would come from an event planner or a site related to cooking.

4. Social Media

There is no denying that social media is a goldmine as far as generating traffic to a website. Websites like facebook and twitter are a great way to connect to people and bring them to your website. You can spread a word about your website to your friends and other individuals who are online without the cost of AdWords. Although Google has claimed that adding a link button has no effect on rankings, its potential to drive traffic to your site cannot be denied. Work with friends and other page owners to cross promote your business through social media and drive more potential customers to your site.

Feel free to contact Matt Stellwagen at 540 Design Studio if you have any questions on this article.