The Best Ways To Improve Site Traffic

One of the biggest concerns about having an online presence is a way to get people to find the website in the first place. While this may not be a huge issue for small, local businesses, who are satisfied with a simple informational page, however, this can be a nightmare for other productive sites. This brings up some important questions about the best ways to improve site traffic and building a stronger presence.

There is a huge debate on whether or not more time should be spent on link building or on page SEO. On page SEO techniques include anything that you can alter or control on your site. Unfortunately, when a website owner asks an internet marketing firm what should be done, the answer often happens to be whatever that particular firm specializes in. In reality, the best answer is that it really depends on your particular needs at that particular moment. Well, probably this is not the straight forward answer a person wants to hear, but it is the truth. And in order to help people make a proper decision on how to improve site traffic, we will discuss four general situations that may be the cause of your low rankings.

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So let’s get started:

Situation 1: The Rebel

The Rebel is the website that has done everything they shouldn’t have in order to get noticed with Google. This site has taken advantage of every type of link-building method out there whether it is advised or not and has collected a large amount of links, so the site can get Google’s attention. However, it’s not a positive attention. Generally, negative effects can range from a small drop in search engine rankings to complete removal from the engines. Here are a few things, which may result in ranking penalties:

Large numbers of back-links with little or no value
Paid links
Very aggressive targeting of anchor-text
Link farming (use of automatic methods of exchanges and networking)

Once the site has been penalized for the poor link building, there is not much the on-page SEO can do to handle the situation. As an owner, you need to sit down and put a lot of work into correcting the current problem. Locate the problematic links and do your best to fix them. Focus on building positive back-links and please stop the actions that got you into trouble in the first place. If Google does not re-index your website within a reasonable time frame, you may need to contact them for reconsideration.

Situation 2: On-page Fanatical

Many new webmasters have taken the time to research everything there is to know about search engine optimization. They have gone through hundreds of forums, articles, and websites about using proper SEO to get good rankings. Keyword rules are being followed to a “t” as the person slaves away making each page perfect. After a certain point, the return from this much optimization greatly diminishes. With a website properly optimized, it is important to start working on back-links. You need to have faith that all the hard work you have put into your site will begin to pay off sooner or later. This is not to say that you should completely avoid adding new content, but your energy needs to be focused on other aspects of ranking as well. Spend the next few months getting high quality links so that all of your website’s bases are covered.

Situation 3: An SEO Calamity

This is the same concept as The Rebel because this website has spent a good deal of time perfecting on-page SEO. The webmaster has used every good and bad trick in the book in order to make search engine spiders pick up the site for every targeted keyword. Over optimization is now being penalized by Google because it may be considered spam. Many aspects of the on-page optimization have spun totally out of control. Here are a few things to look for:

Content that lacks value
Excessive tags, internal search, and categories
Overuse of keywords
Bad redirects
Unbalanced ad-to-content ratio
Crawl paths that are blocked
Bad design and poor internal linking

Even though you may have had the best intentions when doing your optimization, Google is starting to see this as a obvious attempt to please the search engines. Websites should still be focused on the user and not on the engine spiders. Building links in this situation is a waste of time because you need to fix the problems present on the pages. Spend time reorganizing your content and cleaning up the mess.

Situation 4: The Popular Kid

This website has grown over time and successfully established itself as an authority within a particular niche. Many people know it and as a result it has a number of high quality links. These are often sites that have steadily become popular over time without too much planning. While it is not a bad thing for sites to grow organically, there are sometimes problems that sneak by as time passes. Look through your pages and see if any of the following apply to the site in question:

The back-links to some of the content is no longer in existence
Business goals are not integrated properly in the web design
No current keyword research and application
Internal links need to be cleaned up
Overlapping or duplicated page titles

The popularity of this site sometimes masks the fact that problems exist. The goal here is to maximize the true potential of the website by going in and properly applying SEO techniques throughout the site. There is no reason to ignore link-building, but you can easily boost up your traffic, if you spent some time on page issues as well.