Traffic is the lifeline of your website and online business. If your website does not have enough traffic, you simply can’t even hope to succeed. It is important to put an effective SEO strategy in place to attract more qualified traffic to your website. However, succeeding at SEO is not a child’s play. You have to employ good practices and avoid bad habits of the past.

Here are 6 great ways to accomplish the task of improving search results through SEO.

• Use Keywords Strategically:

Your SEO campaign is destined to fail if you don’t do proper keyword research. It is the keyword research which lays foundation and groundwork for your SEO. In simple words, the keywords you choose should be as specific to your products as possible. They should not have any marketing vibe. They should sound natural and must be easy to read and understand.

For example, the keyword “buy raw cat food” is more likely to appeal people who actually want to buy cat food than simple “cat food. The later keyword is obscure while the earlier is clear, concise and entices visitors to make a purchase. However, you should focus on publishing high quality content on regular basis instead of achieving keyword perfection. Focus on long tail keywords as they are more specific, targeted and result in better conversion rates.

• Say No to Black Hat SEO:

Black hat SEO techniques like over-optimization and spamming no longer produce results. In fact, they are a perfect recipe for disaster. They do not only adversely affect your SEO but make you liable to punishment by Google. Therefore, make sure that all of the content on your website is original and owned by you. Similarly, all the links on the website should be genuine and well earned.

• Page Load Speed:

Many people including some experts totally ignore this very important aspect of SEO. Google actually loves the websites with fast load speeds and tends to rank them higher in search results. It is a fact that users normally leave a website even if it takes just a few seconds to load. This results in reduced number of paged viewed, increased bounce rate and low dwell time. All these things can adversely affect your SEO efforts.

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You can increase the load speed of your website by optimizing images, installing caching plugins, streamlining and cleaning the code, minimizing redirects, enabling compression and deleting useless plugins.

 

• Header Tags are Important:

People don’t want to even look at walls of text, nothing to talk about reading them. You can greatly enhance user experience of your site by properly formatting your content. Good content formatting makes people spend more time on your website and return for more. This will also indicate Google and other search engines that your website contains high quality relevant content.

You can break your content into easier to read and utilize sections using header tags. Google also gives more weightage to keywords if they are used in header tags. You can actually boost your ranking against certain keywords by using them in header tags.

• Outbound Links:

Just like high quality inbound links, linking to renowned and authority websites is also an excellent SEO practice. This makes your content more useful and relevant in addition to providing your visitors with more in-depth sources to benefit from. Linking to trusted and relevant websites also helps you build credibility and trust with the visitors and Google considers both these things while ranking your website.

• Website Architecture and Navigation:

Your website will have a high bounce rate if it is difficult for the visitors to find required information right away. This also results in reduced number of page reviews and low dwell time. It is necessary for your website to have a well-constructed architecture and easy to understand navigation. This will help visitors immediately find what they are looking for on your website and come back for more. The more the repeated visitors on your website, better will be its ranking.

There are many other things you need to take care of such as mobile optimization, broken links on your website, social sharing and readability to enhance your search rankings. Ultimately, it is both the SEO and user experience that will help you attract more traffic and convert that traffic to sales in the long run.