Five SEO Tips to Increase Website Traffic

1. Keyword Research

Search Engine Optimization (read an intro to SEO here) begins with the investment of an extreme effort into researching your keywords. There are many people who are utilizing SEO, but are so terribly impatient that they end up implementing their ideas too quickly, resulting in a loss of time and visitors.

One must thoroughly research the best keywords for their niche in order to find the most success with SEO. However, the process takes a lot of patience and the execution of proper calculations. Most importantly, you need an arsenal of quality tools with which to perform the aforementioned research, to ensure that you’re receiving the best data available.

Two of my favorite tools are the ‘Google AdWords: Keyword Tool‘ and ‘Google Insights for Search.’ These tools can help you understand the volume for your desired keywords, whether those numbers are expected to rise or decline, and much more. The key here is to find keywords that offer a high enough volume to be profitable, but are small enough to be easily targeted, without having to push through tons of competition. Be sure to identify keywords that you can use for various pages throughout your website. You might also consider using a keyword or two for an exact-match domain name. Remember that organic SEO is always one of the most profitable methods to gaining traffic.

2. Content: Optimized? Original?

There are still people out there who believe that if they simply smush their keyword(s) onto a page as many times as possible, they will rank higher. This is certainly not true! When creating content for your site, it must be original and naturally written so that your visitors can understand it. However, that does not mean that you cannot optimize your content for the search engines. Typically, the recommended keyword density (percentage of times a keyword appears on a page compared to the total number of words on the page) is about 5% to 6%.

I prefer to target one keyword per article/post. Some people may target two or even three in one piece of content. Being able to do this depends on the length of your content and how similar the keywords are – just remember to never overdo it. Whenever possible, start your content (and finish it) with the most valuable keyword.

3. On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Spiders sent from search engines are best able to crawl a website when it has proper HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and the structure of the page is clear and concise. It is also recommended to have an .xml sitemap, which directs spiders. You may use the Google Webmaster Panel to submit your sitemap.

Having a proper description can help bring you additional visitors – not because of the SEO value (since search engines no longer use that in their ranking algorithms,) but because when someone is searching, your description is typically what they will see before coming to your site. Furthermore, you should always make good use of the H1 – H6 Tags. Your most important keyword should be H1, etc.

4. Article Marketing

One great SEO technique is to distribute articles and press releases about your site – this is known as article marketing. You may submit your articles to a number of article directories, receiving valuable backlinks and traffic in return. There are also websites that will accept, and display, your press releases.

I have noticed this technique to be sufficiently effective. It can help your pages get crawled quickly, which helps backup the ranking of your site. Plus, if you have the ability to leave links pointing back to your site, you can expect an increase in ranking from this as well. There also might be an SEO Benefit with Squidoo and vBulletin Blogs.

5. Social Bookmarking

I submit all of my articles, posts, external blog-entries, etc. to social bookmarking websites immediately after they have been published. My favorite social bookmarking sites would be: Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Mister Wong.