5 Proven SEO Techniques That Guarantee More Google Traffic

TweetI find myself talking less and less about SEO and more and more about creating great content that your visitors will return again and again to consume.  But the truth is that good “white-hat” SEO techniques are extremely important to driving traffic to your website.

“White hat” Search Engine Optimization is the act of making your website friendly to search engines while staying within the guidelines laid out by those search engines.  It implies that you are not using techniques that could get your site banned or penalized by the search engines.

Keep in mind that Google and the others are running a business.  They are in the business of returning relevant and trustworthy results to your queries.  They make money by giving you great answers to your questions.  They are only interested in sites that have good stuff.

But it is our job to make sure that Google and the others are able to determine what our website is about.  The search engines have the monumental task of reading, categorizing and delivering billions of web pages.

5 Proven SEO Techniques

Ensure That Google Can See Your Site: Firstly, you must ensure that Google can see your website.  People often tell me that they are not getting any traffic from search engines.  Upon a quick investigation of their site, I will see that Google cannot see their website or that Google is being unknowingly blocked from accessing the website.

I won’t go into the dozens of reasons your site may not be in a search engine index —  If you find that your site is not being seen by Google and the others, contact me or another Internet Marketing professional to determine and fix the problem.

Here is how you can determine if your site is being seen and thus “indexed” by Google and the others.  This will work with Google, Yahoo and Bing and you should try it out with each.

1. Navigate to www.google.com.
2. Type the following:  site:mysite.com
3. This will return a list of the web pages that Google has placed in its index.
4. Repeat for Yahoo and Bing

If you find that there is nothing in the index of one of the search engines — you have a major problem.  There is something keeping that search engine from indexing your site.  If you find that there are web pages that have been indexed, browse through the indexed pages and ensure that you don’t have major portions of your website missing from the search engines index.

Keep Your Site Updated With Fresh Content: There is absolutely nothing that Google likes more than fresh, text content.  Good old HTML content — this is one of the reasons I am a huge advocate for business blogging.  Blogging adds fresh, text content to your site — kind of like this post.

Do you want to see how much text Google is seeing on your website.  Type your URL of choice into this tool called SEO Browser.  The tool will show you how much text is visible to the search engines.  Now test the tool out on those competitors that are ranking better than you in the search engines.  Do they have more text?  Thought so.

You don’t need to be putting text on your site just for the sake of adding text.  Add good, relevant text content to your site and watch your search engine traffic soar.

Make It Easy To Categorize:  Your content needs to be categorized by Google and this is a huge task.  Make it as easy as possible for Google to determine what each page is about on your site.

The best way to do this is to use the HTML that the forefathers of the Internet created for us.  Was forefathers a little much?  Thought so. 

Here are the important tags:

• Title Tag: The title tag is the most important piece of information on a web page.  It should contain keywords that you would like to be ranking for.  The tag should be unique for each page of your site and should be relevant to the content on that page.  You will find the title tag in your code between these two tags <title> Your Tag </title>
• H1, H2, etc Tags:  The heading tags are also important tags on a web page.  They indicate to the search engines that the words and phrases inside those <h1>, <h2>, etc tags are important.  Use keywords here where relevant and appropriate.
• Strong or Bold:  There is actually a difference between the bold and strong tags but they have the same visual effect.  They make the text bigger and darker.  Use the <strong> tag on keywords that you would like to bold, it lends weight to the keyword to the search engine.
• The Link Tag:   When you link to other pages on your own website, you can choose the anchor text to use for the link.  If you use the phrase ‘blue buckets’ in your copy on a page, link that phrase to your ‘blue buckets’ product page.  It makes sense to your users and it lends weight to your ‘blue buckets’ product page for that term.

When you properly use HTML, the search engines will find it much easier to categorize your site.

Network With Other Sites:  Just as you build your network off-line, you need to build a network online.  Google likes to see other sites that are relevant to your industry that are linking to your website.  For example, if you sell blue buckets, get a link from a company that repairs blue buckets.

XML Sitemap:  This sounds complicated but is actually quite simple.  An XML sitemap is a roadmap of your website.  When you create one you probably won’t understand what it means — it is in XML code.  Don’t worry, it’s not for you — it is for the search engines.

Create the sitemap using a free service like this one and upload it to your server on the root of your domain.  If you have trouble with this, get help from someone that knows what they are doing.

Tagged as: Link Building, sem, seo