This article captures the Top 10 Great SEO Tips To Increase Traffic to Your Website. A sound and fully optimized website technical environment is critical and a great priority when it comes to SEO and capturing strong organic traffic levels.

If you don’t have your website SEO set up correctly, your content will not get crawled, so it’s useless and pointless to not focus on your website technology first and foremost. Websites are usually managed via a
content management system housed on a website server.

Both the content management system and website server have important influence on how search engines crawl your content when reaching your website. Most SEO crawling tools and SEO platforms look at these key areas as part of their auditing features.

Top 10 Great SEO Tips To Increase Traffic To Your Website

There are some important areas that must be “set up” correctly to ensure the ideal crawling of your website. Let’s take a look at the Top 10 Great SEO Tips To Increase Traffic to Your Website.

1. Redirects

Redirects are used when a page has been moved to a different location or URL. These can be temporary or permanent. There are many kinds of redirects, but it’s important to know that search engines recognize and pass SEO value only for permanent redirects.

These are also called 301 redirects (whereas temporary ones are called 302 redirects). If you are using a redirect for temporary purposes, it should be flagged and evaluated as to why you are using it and for how long.

2. URL Structures

URLs are an important area for search engines. The actual URL string provides a unique identification for the page, almost like your national identification number. Additionally, URLs are a key area search engines look to when identifying what the page is about. In fact, it is critical that URLs and their folder structures include keywords. It’s also best to use hyphens when separating terms.

Hyphens communicate to search engines to separate out the terms versus merging them and ranking them for the merged phrase search results. Additionally, the closer to the root folder of the URL, which is the folder closest to the .com, the more emphasis the keyword gets.

3. Web page and Website load time

How quickly a web page loads, or page speed, is one of the most important ranking factors right now. The top search engine ranking is typically dominated by faster-loading pages, especially on mobile devices that are at the center of Google’s design. Furthermore, quick-loading pages positively affect user experience and may increase your conversion rates.

Google will reduce your search engine rankings if your site or web page loads slowly. Slow load time is typically attributed to your server performance and the density of your web page’s HTML code.

Keep code simple, clean, and easy to process.

4. XML sitemap and robots.txt files

XML sitemaps and robots.txt files are files that allow you to communicate to search engines the web pages that should get into the search results and rankings.

Be sure to leverage your CMS tools to build a complete XML sitemap and robots.txt files and have them validated and submitted via Google’s Search Console tool.

5. Broken pages or 404 errors

A 404 error page means that a web page is not accessible or no longer there. This is usually a result of a broken link or a link using the wrong URL for a web page.

The 404 error hampers the user experience by preventing a user from connecting to a desired page. Because of this, websites that produce many 404 errors can lead to a drop in SEO rankings and traffic.

6. Duplicate content

Duplicate content was one of Google’s original spam checks and part of its algorithm early on. Web pages are considered duplicates if their content is 80 percent or more similar. Sites that have duplicate content are usually significantly affected by penalties and lower search engine rankings.

Sometimes duplicate content happens by accident due to CMS or URL structuring reasons, so it’s important to ensure there is only one URL created for a web page.

7. Page linking

Page linking within a website is extremely important. Search engines follow them while crawling the site, and the anchor text that links use are another area search engines look to for determining what a page is about (also called relevancy).

Every page should have at least one internal link pointing to it and should include the term that you’d like the page to rank for in the anchor text. It’s also recommended that the number of links to a page from within a site (not external sites) be no more than 3,000.

8. SEO meta tags

HTML tags are extremely important to search engines. They explain what your site is about, what to display in the search engine result copy it ranks for, and what type of page it is (recipe, product page, etc.). Each page should have its own unique set of tags. Similar to duplicate content, tag duplication can be a big hindrance to search engine rankings.

9. HTTPS encryption

Providing users with a secure website has become a top priority to search engines. Security has become part of the search engine ranking algorithm. Google says, “HTTPS is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user’s computer and site”

Websites that do not support HTTPS connects should expect a lower ranking in search engine results and be surpassed by sites that are using HTTPs in search results.

10. Page layout and text usage

The top-ranking pages typically offer long-form content, so it’s important that your pages have a lot of text around a given subject. Search engines tend to reward fast-loading pages that offer a lot of basic text copy (some even more than 500 words) with the top rankings.

Be sure your web pages offer a lot of text, especially in the “above the fold of the page” area, or the area at the top of the page that is initially displayed upon loading, without scrolling. Copy that’s within an image does not count since search engines have a difficult time reading the image and typically just scan a page and extract basic HTML text.

In Conclusion, these are the key “website SEO environment” areas that take top priority. Be sure these are set up and implemented correctly.

It is important to understand how to increase your visibility on the first page of google. Particularly if you are serious on driving traffic to your website. Google normally assess the intent behind each search and will display the results it considers most appropriate, based on previous user behaviour.

This article presents seven free ways on How to Increase Your Visibility on the First Page of Google

#1. Google Organic Results

The amount of traffic you get from your Google ranking obviously depends on the position you’re showing in this area.

The latest statistics according to Advanced Web Ranking’s click-through rate study, shows that ranking position one (top of Google), for example, can bring you 38% of all the clicks made by people searching for that phrase.

Ranking in position two brings only 18.47% of the searchers. By the time you get onto page two, even the top listing is only picking up 1.86% of all searcher clicks.

One of the most common mistakes with SEO is complacency. Those running websites that rank on page one, but not in top spot, always assume that there is little to gain by focusing on increasing their ranking further. You can see from these stats, however, that being persistent and aggressive until you own top spot can really pay off.

#2. Featured Snippets

The second free way to appear on Google’s first page is through Featured Snippets. These are short pieces of text displayed by Google above all the other organic results as shown on the page.

Because they’re shown above all the regular results, they’re often referred to as ‘position zero’ results.

#3. Google Local

If you’re a local business such as Jumia Kenya, you’ll be well aware of Google’s map listings that appear for searches likely to have ‘local intent’, as shown below.

#4. Using Other People’s Websites

Again, it’s worth mentioning that you don’t have to use your own website to get business from Google. In fact, sometimes, appearing on a third party site can give you more credibility.

I know of a client, for example, who picks up as many leads from an article he wrote on somebody else’s website, as they do from their own traffic!

This makes sense; if someone else writes about you and says how great you are, doesn’t that hold more weight
than if you’re writing about yourself saying how great you are?

#5. Website Relevance

More than ever, this is the mechanism that defines Google’s success to date. The reason Google has become so dominant is that web users keep coming back because the results are more relevant.

Top of the list is the content on your website. That is the words and, to some extent, the pictures. Google has software that is affectionately called ‘robots’ that reads the internet constantly.

These robots are crawling over your website and making a note every time each relevant word appears.

#6. Popularity and Authority

Another way that Google uses to decide where to rank any website is that site’s authority and popularity.

If lots of websites link to webpage A, but no websites link to webpage B, then webpage A would usually be more popular and would have higher Page Rank. All those links mean that it’s probably a more useful and popular page, so if all else was equal, it should rank higher on Google.

#7. Quality Website Content

No discussion on Google ranking factors would be complete without a mention of content quality. In Google’s desire to serve searchers with the most valuable search results, it’s obvious that the content ‘quality’ of your website would be important.

Websites with small content – meaning low word counts, poor quality writing or pages with little to no text at all, always struggle to rank. Improving and increasing content is often the fastest way to boost a struggling site’s ranking.