Using SEO Techniques To Improve Organic Traffic To A Website

SEO or search engine optimisation is a very interesting tool. It is a vast term which holds within itself several techniques and strategies which can be used in myriad different ways to improve the health of a website. Every website strives to see a good influx of traffic for it is directly proportional to the conversions taking place which in turn results in an increase in e-commerce.

Few websites are actually able to capitalise on the strengths of SEO techniques and see a positive ROI. Others dream of it but are unaware of how to achieve it. In order to even think of applying SEO techniques to a website, it is very important to understand properly the true meaning of SEO.
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Understanding SEO

The acronym SEO refers to a process wherein a website is able to get web traffic from the free, editorial, organic and natural searches being conducted on search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. Simply speaking adopting SEO techniques increases the quantity as well as the quality of web traffic that a website receives.

Making SEO techniques work for a website

The making of a good website includes several stages. In the pre-planning stages, one needs to understand the essence of the website being created. Certain questions which attain great relevance at this stage are:

• What is the website all about,
• What purpose is it expected to serve and
• How committed is the website owner towards the making of this website.

Once these 3 pertinent questions have been successfully answered, the stage to optimise the website and ensure its health begins. There are some basic tips which need to be followed like:

• Choosing a primary topic: It never helps to confuse the viewer. Hence one website should be about only one topic. Irrespective of what the contents of the website contain, this primary topic needs to shine through.
• Relevance of keywords: For any content to be noticed by search engine “crawlers”, it needs to contain keywords in strategic locations. In fact, in order to ensure the appropriateness of the keywords, one needs to research for the same. Once the list of relevant keywords is in place, they need to be placed at locations which will make it visible to the search engines. These relevant locations which need to have the keyword incorporated in them include the:
  • URL of the website,
  • Website title,
  • Description,
  • Tagline,
  • Page title and content etc.

Care must, however, be taken to ensure that keyword stuffing is avoided at all costs. Incorporation of the keywords in the articles should be such that they go with the flow of the same without creating brakes and jerks.

• Incorporation of links: This is one of the most important SEO techniques that can be adopted to improve the health of a website. In fact, most content management systems tend to automatically incorporate links from the important pages of a website to its landing page or home page. These important pages are also cross-linked with each other so as to facilitate easy accessibility for the user.
• Use of permalink structures: Permalink structures which make use of numbers to facilitate the identification of WebPages and websites should be avoided at all costs. They never look good and create a bad impression on the user. The URL structure of a website should always include text with the keywords incorporated in them thereby making them become more specific and relevant to the user.
• Page speed: This is a very important factor which decides the fate of a website. Pages which take a lot of time to load are generally ignored by search engines when they rank the results to search queries made by users. Thus anything which tends to negatively affect the page speed should not be incorporated in the webpage. These non-essentials which have a tendency to bring down the page speed are music players, flash graphics and large images, unnecessary plugins etc.
• Alt image tags: The presence of the keyword in the image description makes for good SEO tactics. Thus it is very important to rename files if they do not contain the keyword, incorporate the keyword in the image title and description as well as in its alt attributes.
• Website updations: Every search engine gives preference to websites which are dynamic and active. In short, websites which keep uploading new content on a regular basis are considered by search engines to be active and given priority over other websites. Thus it is very important to keep updating the website and the WebPages with fresh content on a regular basis.
• Changing the URL name: The URL age plays an important part in determining the search engine rankings for a particular website. Hence the older the URL is, the better is the preference. Thus changing the URL regularly actually defeats the purpose of ensuring the health of a website. In fact, it takes a long time for new URLs to find their way in search engine rankings.

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All the above factors contribute to making a website get priority over the rest. Hence they should be diligently followed so that as the website health improves, there is also an increase in the flow of traffic that it receives.