Are you new to building a website for your business, non-profit, or hobby-related initiative that needs publicity? Maybe you have just launched your shiny new website but you still do not have the regular traffic you desire. If you recognize yourself in these hypotheses, this blog article is just for you!
How to Start?
Creating a website these days is easier than ever before. There are many guides that explain how to create a great website without having any coding knowledge. Usually, you only need to use one of the great content management systems, such as WordPress, having previously checked the web hosting prices and purchased a decently working and cheap web hosting plan from any of the modern hosting providers like Hostens. These are the basic technical preparations you need to complete.
How to Increase Your Traffic?
To boost your website’s traffic and, eventually, your business’ sales, you need to apply search engine optimization (SEO) strategies together with filling in the site with its content. SEO practices are not a magical method to increase your traffic, but they are no less important for your website’s success than the high-quality content you will publish on it.
SEO could definitely help you rank higher when people look for certain keywords on Google. No wonder why companies all around the globe hire SEO specialists to improve their ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engine options.
What Steps Should I Follow to Perform an Efficient SEO?
In this article, we will let you know how you could improve your SEO ranking on your own step by step. We have built this relatively short guide so that it could be useful to all website owners who already have published niche-related content on their sites and they want to increase their traffic. But all the tips here could also be applied by novice website builders as well. We really believe that it could help you learn a lot of new things about how to boost the number of your page’s daily visitors.
Step #1: Optimize all your existing content
Optimizing your website’s existing content is the first step you should take in improving your SEO. For this purpose, you must first find pages on your website (articles, videos, photos, and other publications) that have not been updated for a long time. Once you find them, review their content and apply the necessary keywords you found through any free or paid SEO tool, such as SemRush (free option), SE Ranking (paid), or Ahrefs (free option). Make sure that you put the keywords in sentences that really make sense and that the newly added texts are related to the rest of the content.
Step #2: Make your site mobile-friendly
According to the latest statistical data, more than 90% of all internet users nowadays use mobile phones to access the internet. More and more often people use mobile phones or tablet devices only for personal usage, and they prefer using their laptops only for work. Most probably, this is the reason why Google uses an index type that selects only the mobile versions of the websites. Hence, you should make your website mobile-friendly as soon as possible to prevent it from not being indexed by Google, which is the most used search engine around the globe.
Step #3: Apply keywords that are not that competitive as well
Many website owners make a huge mistake by targeting top keywords only. At first glance, this is the right approach. And, in fact, the presence of certain top keywords is really of great importance. But as these keywords are being used by many other site owners too, it makes it very hard for some websites to be found through a Google search. This is why the presence of not-that-popular but still topic-related keywords is quite beneficial for each website. By using less competitive keywords that are still often searched on Google, you could definitely enjoy a better traffic boost than if you use the top keywords only.
Step #4: Structure the textual content for the featured snippets on Google
Featured snippets are short excerpt from the textual content of a website that is shown in the upper part of the results of any search conducted on Google. The search engine performs this action in order to promptly provide the visitor with the answer they are looking for. Check the visual example below to see how it looks like.
To make some textual content of your website appear as a featured snippet, here are a few pieces of advice on how you could optimize your textual content for this purpose:
- Conduct keyword research as usual
- Construct your text, so it answers questions
- Start your texts with the most newsworthy information instead of general facts.
- Create the featured snippet text in less than 50 words
Step #5: Publish trending content
By publishing trending content, which is usually quite sharable on social media, you could significantly improve your SEO strategy. If you succeed to publish regular content that is related to the trending news in the society you target, there is a high likelihood that your website will receive even more visits. In case you do not have the resources to frequently publish content, you could publish shorter content, for example, quotes and resumes. Another popular and useful option for you might be using a tool that could legally publish social media publications of popular figures directly on your website. Just evolve your imagination, and you will surely discover many different possibilities for publishing trending content.
Step #6: Perform image optimization
When performed in the right way, optimizing your website’s images could help you boost your overall traffic impressions. You could do it by applying top keywords to the alt tags that are invisible to the audience but do exist in the background. The alt tags of the images are usually used for short descriptions of the images on a website, but they could be used as SEO tools as well.
Besides the alt tags, there are also some additional image optimization practices you could perform:
- As the loading speed matters for better SEO performance, use only images with good quality but low in megabytes.
- Make sure that you do not breach any copyrights by applying a certain image. Google ranks lower the websites that do not comply with the legal rules protecting the copyrights.
- Try to avoid the application of images that are randomly downloaded from the internet or stock images that have already been used on various other websites.
- Check the mobile-friendliness of every image you upload to your website, as most of the online traffic nowadays is mobile.
Step #7: Make your site load faster
A website that takes much time to show its content could decrease its chances of being visited as most internet surfers usually lose patience and promptly leave a page that does not load instantly or almost instantly. This is the reason why the loading speed is among the most important factors for a website to be highly ranked on Google. We recommend you remove all elements that make your website load slowly or optimize their sizes. Thus, your loading speed will be faster and your website’s SEO settings will be much more efficient.
Step #8: Monitor your performance with Google Analytics
As the main purpose of improving your SEO rankings is attracting more visitors, we would like to suggest you use the analytical tool Google Analytics, which is offered by Google. It could monitor and analyze your website’s performance. And it reports the traffic information and the final results to you. Thus, you can always notice what you should enhance or change to improve your page’s performance.
Final Words
You are already familiar with the 8 most important steps you should take to improve your SEO rankings, and you know how to make sure that your website responds to the requirements of Google, so it can be highly ranked there.
If you have nоt made your own website yet but have come across this article because you are about to make one soon, then you are probably also interested in a cheap web hosting service. We have a suggestion for you! Why don’t you check the web hosting prices of Hostens? Ranking high on Trustpilot with 4.7 out of 5 stars for its many extras and great customer service, Hostens has proven to be one of the few internationally popular hosts that offer really great quality at very low prices. The excellent customer satisfaction is the main proof of their excellent services.