Web Site Traffic - Get It Naturally

Getting website traffic naturally starts with a few basics, good site design, using the right keywords and keyword phrases, offering quality content, providing easy navigation and a logical flow. 

However, great search engine ranking won't do you much good if the people that come to your site don't find what they expected and click off as fast as they clicked on. Your well ranking website has to follow good design, easy navigation and worthwhile content.

Here are the strategies for how to design your website for more traffic and how you can get it naturally.

Start with Good Website Design Strategies

Many website owners spend too much time making their site pretty. They use things like animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds.  These things won't impress your visitors  if you first don't offer good content, easy navigation and a logical flow.

Don't try to be all things to all people. Design your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don't confuse your readers with links all over the page. Design a logical flow and lead your viewers to where you would like them to go.  Employ good web page optimization by using relevant keywords in your title and description tags and uses good text links to link relevant pages and topics. 

Offer quality content. Provide information on your site that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information that is personal and unique. If you are promoting products, write purposeful reviews that help your readers make informed decisions.  Give your viewers a reason to come back.

Choose a Keyword Rich Domain Name

Choose a domain name that has your site's keywords in it. For example, if your site is about pet care, try to include the words "pet care" or words related to pet care in your domain name.  I might not be possible to get the exactly the keywords you want but variations like 'mypetcare' or 'petcareplace' or 'justpetcare' would all be acceptable options.

Find Relevant, highly searched Keywords
Use relevant keywords that people use to find your content. This requires keyword research and there are several tools to help you out in this area. Here are my favorites:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I suggest focusing on 1-3 keywords or keyword phrase per page of your website. Too many keywords per page can confuse the search engines and they will find it harder to distinguish what the page is about.

A good rule of thumb is to always consider each page of your site as a landing page. If you have proper navigation on your pages, it will easily allow viewers to see everything you have to offer.

Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your page as well as in at least one header phrase. Also work the keywords into the body of your text as often as you can without sounding redundant.

Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in your page description tag. Many search engines no longer look at the keyword tags, but I recommend using them and including the plural forms as well.

Alt Tags
Search engines don't index images, therefore any text on your site that is presented in image format won't get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, fill in your ALT tags with your keywords. This will boost your keyword frequency and help your site achieve better ranking.

Linking
Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to your site, so it's important to establish quality, related links. This can be accomplished in a few ways. One way is to establish reciprocal links with other like sites. When exchanging links be sure to include your keywords in your site title.

Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be sure it is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative. I also recommend that the site's index page have a Google PR rating of at least one. This ensures that the site is not being penalized by Google. If it is a penalized site then you could be penalized as well for linking to it.

Include a 'tell a friend' and 'bookmark' script on your site.
This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of all return to your site.

Include a Site Map
Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how it's organized, where it is located with respect to other information, and how to get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible.

Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots. This can increase your chances of becoming indexed because a site map allows the search engines to easily visit every page of your site.

A site map works best if you include a link to your site map in the navigation of every page on your site.

Keep Your Content Fresh
Finally, don't let your site become stale. I have found that my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add new pages to my site and keep the content up-to-date and fresh. It's a surefire way to help keep web site traffic coming.