“I have a website for my business, but only a few people visit it. How do I get more traffic to my site?”
It’s the question of the decade. For years, I’ve picked the brains of experts in hopes of discovering a magic key that unlocks the mysteries of search engine optimization.
Turns out there is no magic key; enticing visitors to your site requires old-fashioned elbow grease. And it doesn’t hurt to know an expert on good search engine optimization. Whenever I feel technologically overwhelmed, I call Gary Pickering, owner of Bellingham-based Whatcom Web (www.whatcomweb.com).
“Gary the SEO Guy” (as I call him) knows terrific traffic-building strategies; he agreed to share some must-dos.
The most important factor in increasing traffic is knowing which terms people will use to find your site. You have to think like your customer. Let’s say you own a towing company in Marysville. Your customers will likely search Google or Bing using phrases such as “Marysville towing,” “towing services Marysville,” or “car towing.”
The problem with many business websites, says Pickering, is that their content doesn’t contain the search terms they want to be found for. It’s important to spend time researching words and phrases your ideal customer will likely use to find your business, your products, your services and each page on your website, then incorporate those words into each page on your site.
The most important place on your site to add keywords is your page title. When you open any Web page, you’ll see the page title in the upper left corner of your browser. Page title text is also displayed in search engine results.
Just for fun, I visited the Snohomish County Business Journal’s website, www.scbj.com. The title of every page is “Snohomish County Business Journal: Welcome.”
Using your business name as a page title isn’t bad, especially in the case of SCBJ, where the business name exactly matches the search term most people would use. But to gain more SEO “juice,” your page title should open with a term that describes your business.
Every page on the SCBJ site includes the identical keyword, “Welcome.” The publication can improve its ranking by changing “Welcome” to a unique page identifier such as “Aerospace News,” “Business Briefs” and so on.
“Search engines give more weight to words at the beginning of the page title,” said Pickering. Whatcom Web’s home page title, for example, reads “SEO | Internet Marketing | Social Media Consulting | Whatcom Web | Bellingham.”
A page title must also be short. If it’s too long, search engines won’t give credit to the text at the end of the title. Pickering recommends 50 to 80 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
The page description is also important. The description is the content that displays under the title in search results. The SCBJ description currently displays the first line from the May cover story. (That’s fine with me, because my business, Blogging Bistro, was the subject of May’s cover story.) But the description should read more like an “About Us” teaser that explains, in 160 characters or less, what SCBJ is all about.
“This text must be accurate and compelling, so it increases the possibility that someone clicks on your website rather than to someone else’s site,” said Pickering.
When people do arrive at your site, treat them to an array of written content, videos, audio and images, all centered around your core keywords. Use key phrases effectively in your page titles, descriptions and content, and you’ll soon see more traffic on your site.
Laura Christianson owns Blogging Bistro (www.bloggingbistro.com), a Snohomish-based company that helps businesses with Web sites, blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Contact her at 425-244-4242 or laura@bloggingbistro.com.
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