Maximize My Website

When you have your own website up and ready, the main focus turns to driving traffic to your site. Whether the website be for selling products or providing specific information all webmasters want quality driven traffic. Not only will quality traffic bring higher conversions but you will also know that your SEO efforts are working.

How to get quality traffic?

Firstly you should be familiar with the term SEO. There are 2 types of SEO. The first type is done onsite which is on your actual website. So you would add relevant titles, alt text, header tags, use certain keywords and add all your meta details.

The second type of SEO is off-site or offline SEO which is working on driving quality traffic. Both types of SEO need to complement each other which I will talk about in due course.

To drive quality traffic to your site I would recommend you do some keyword or key phrase research first. There are many free keyword analyser tools on the web which you can use. I frequently use a site called searchenginegenie.com which has some excellent free resources for webmasters covering various parts of SEO. If there is a lot of competition for your chosen keywords and phrases then try to narrow them down.

For example if you sell Satellite navigation systems and do a little keyword research you will see that the phrase cheap satellite navigation is a common used key-phrase. Type the key-phrase in Google and you will see that 28,400,000 results exist for this phrase. Now try and make the key phrase a little more personal to your website and product. For example if you sell Tom tom satellite systems then do a little research on the phrase and you will find that tom tom sat nav is a popular one for customers to type into search engines. Now type this key phrase into Google and you will see that there are 344,000 results, your competition is now a fraction of the previous figure.

By doing a little keyword or key phrase research and optimizing your site for your products it will make it much quicker for you to start seeing results.

The keywords or phrases you have chosen will be used for your website optimization along with them playing an active role as your anchor text. When you use a key phrase as your anchor text and its also a key phrase on your website then more emphases will be placed on the link by the spiders.

For example: the website example.com sells Sat Navs- the webmaster places a link on site link.com- the webmaster uses one of the chosen key phrases as the anchor text so in this case 'tom tom sat nav'- the spider follows the link to find that 'tom tom sat nav' is also mentioned on the website-This will be noted by the robot and you will rank higher for your key phrase, this is what i refer to when i say both sides of the SEO need to compliment each other in the SEO effort.

However if example.com used 'cheap appliances' as the anchor text and the robot followed it to the site to find nothing mentioned about cheap appliances then not a lot of emphasis will be given to the link. If your asking yourselves what an anchor text is then let me explain.

An example of a normal link would be your url alone, but an anchor link would be a named url. So for example instead of linking back to your website from another site by typing in your url only, use a keyword as an anchor linking to your url. So as the example above shows website example.com linked to their site by using the words 'tom tom sat nav' as the anchor text.

For those who don't know how to create an anchor text then you can go to Google and search for 'creating an anchor text link html'-or something along those lines.

These backlinks that you will now concentrate on will play a big role for your site coming up in the search engines for your key phrases. change your anchor text around with different keywords and tell Google what your site is about and how other websites refer to your site. Drive quality traffic and rank high for your keywords, You are in control.

A few common mistakes people make is that they don't have a SEO strategy. So create one from the start. It will save you much time. Do your keyword or phrase research and off you go. Your on your way to driving quality traffic to your site.

There are many myths about backlinks and the influence they have on Google page ranking which I will cover in my next article. Please subscribe to my feed to stay updated.