There is a host of ways to increase traffic to your site, they don’t take long, but they need to be done.  Business owners often lack the time, or are too lazy to do maintenance, or small fixes. Eventually their site stops attracting traffic or if it is found it does nothing to entice them to stay, in fact they are so put off and don’t come back.

There are numerous ways to tweak a website in order to attract higher traffic volumes and higher conversions, but most are ignored, or to be fair, perhaps they are not known.  Even though SEO has been around for more than a decade, many sites don’t take advantage of the little fixes which Google need to assess a website and which are vital if you want your visitors to find what they are looking for.

Really quick and clean fixes

Give Google a boost by supplying them with the right signals.

Start with Titles.   Even if you are performing well in Google add one more keyword to your title tag.  Subtract one if you are weak in Google.  Remove or shorten your company name and move it to the end of the title and try adding often searched for modifiers to your title, something like ‘shop’, ‘buy’ or ‘affordable’.

Next are Meta tags.  Repeat your keywords at the beginning of the Meta description and remove all other Meta tags as they can clutter your code and make the ‘code to content ratio’ look not so hot.  Remember that Google ignores most of them anyway.

Another signal is Headlines.  Add a sentence which explains your h1 headline.  This is called an h2 headline.  You can also add an h3 headline that includes a teaser, but don’t repeat your keywords too often.

Back links & PageRank.  Ask your friends or family for a link to your site or link out to one of your favorite sites who has a similar product to you.  Add ‘permalinks’ to your site and add nofollow attributes to your contact page link.

Copywriting

Your pages need mention of what it is exactly that is on your site.  You need to use branding, the exact product names and where it is offered, why it is offered and to whom it is available, for example holiday makers.  Detract from any confusion; make your content clear and in doing so you will make who you are and what your product is about very clear too.

Make an unordered list that reflects the most relevant topics of the page.  Three is sufficient.  Place it at the top of the page, saying something like “this page, or article, deals with …” and explain one key term per page.

Try adding at least five tags to your pages such as “Tags: tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5”.  Or “Tags: sunshine, ocean, relaxing, luxury, lazy”.

Replace the images on your homepage with smaller ones so that those who are not using broadband are not excluded from doing business with you.

Convince your visitors to buy.  Include text in the first few sentences which draw them in by building them up before your expound the virtues of your product.

Any, but preferable all these fixes are quick and easy to do.  But the rewards they yield far outweighs the time spent doing them.  Many sites miss out on opportunities because they don’t want to spend less than an hour fixing their websites.  Sad.

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