Queen Media Collective

I’m trying to see us all win in 2019, so I wanted to supply my entrepreneurs with tips on how to make your business pop. Let’s face it, website traffic is super important if you want your business to grow. You can determine how well a business is doing online based on the traffic its website receives. Website traffic also allows businesses to formulate marketing strategies that will help get better ranking in the search engine results. The basic goal of Search Engine Optimization or SEO is to gain more website traffic. But how when there are over 1.8 billion websites on the Internet? It’s simple, you need to utilize SEO to easily be found by your target audience.

With that being said, here’s a list of my top 5 SEO tips to help drive traffic to your website:

1. Keywords

Keywords are your BEST FRIEND when trying to market and grow your business. You should first, research keywords that are used by others in your industry. Include keywords in your title and headers tags (clickable link that appears on search engine results page), meta descriptions (what appears below the title in search engines), and body copy. These keywords help search engines know what your site and pages are about and show them the relevance when users search for those keywords. There are two types of keywords, long-tail and location based. With long-tail keywords you would use words and phrases that sum up your site. For example, if your business is a shoe store, you may think words like “shoes” are worth trying to rank for.

Ideally it would be great if all users who searched “shoes” were directed to your site, but it’s not that easy when there are thousands of other shoe sites. Instead, include long-tail keywords, like “designer shoe boutique.” You have to think about the intent of the searchers. Someone searching “shoes” could be looking for a plethora of things—images, forums, etc.—but someone searching for “designer shoe boutique” are likely to buy shoes. Focusing on longer keyword, you’ll have a better chance of ranking well within search engines and drawing more qualified traffic to your site.

2. Content

Besides your site simply including keywords, your site needs to have high quality and unique content in order to rank well within search engines. Of course, search engines can’t read articles like humans, but they can look at signals to determine whether or not your sites content is worth recommending to searchers. Think about length when creating pages on your site. It’s crucial that they have substantial content, think of quality over quantity. The content should be long enough to provide comprehensive information to site visitors.

Search engines prefer sites that keep their content updated regularly. This means you have to update the pages of your site regularly, unless you are happy with the content on those pages. If this is the case, consider starting a blog that you post in once a week to show search engines the site is being maintained and updated on a regular basis. If your site has pages, articles, and blogs that are related, link this content together whenever possible. If you’re writing a new article about interior design, link to an earlier post about home décor.

3. Backlinks

Website are ranked based on the number of unique domain names linking back to your site. This indicates how many site owners are referencing your content within their own content. Guest blogging is a good way to attract different audiences and essentially bring more traffic to your site. ALWAYS take advantage of any opportunity you have to produce content for another website. If it’s okay with the editor of the site you’re guest blogging on add links to your website in the article. Build relationships with other site owners that could eventually grow into links. When content from another site links to your website, it positions you as a reliable knowledge source which in turn strengthens your search engine rankings.

4. SSL Certificates

An SSL certificate changes our website’s “http://” to “https://” which makes it more trustworthy and protected. Use a SSL certificate if you want a search engine to trust your site.

5. Optimize Images

For a better search engine ranking, you need to optimize images by adding descriptions, alt tags, and titles. Search engines can’t identify an image, but they can identify the text with an image to rate the relevancy of a page. Always use good quality, original, optimally sized images.

Now that I’ve provided you with the basics, try it out for yourself and see the benefits of using SEO to drive traffic to your site.