Increase Traffic To Your Web Site

Getting More Web Visitors For Free by Jane Thurnell-Read

You’ve got a web site, but how do you get visitors? How do you increase the traffic to your site without having to pay for it? To someone new to this, it may all seem mysterious, or you may believe you have to pay a lot of money to get your site found and ranked well by the search engines. While employing experts can be helpful, there are some simple things you can do yourself.

One of the most important things you can do is consider the keywords you should use. Keywords are the words that people use to search the web. So, for example, ‘mobile phone’ is a commonly used search word/term, whereas ‘kinesiologist in Mongolia’ is hardly ever/never used.

Your website should include the keywords that people commonly use when searching for the products/services that you want to promote. Some search engine optimisation (SEO) articles talk about stuffing the page with these keywords. When I first read phrases like this, I was repelled at the idea. I also read that if you put a lot of keywords in a piece, Google and the other search engines smell a rat and penalise you, so this was another reason not to do it.

But in the last few months I have been looking again at using keywords with some great results. In our health products shop on our sister web site, we have a product called Water Retention Tablets. I put that on the site approximately 2 months ago, and in the last month I have had 1600 people look at that page alone. If you do a search for ‘water retention tablets’ or ‘vitamin B complex’ on Google, our pages are in the top 3 on the first page (at least in the UK where we are based). This is without paying for any promotion at all. Part of the immediate success of these pages is because the web site has been around a long time and the search engines like the site for all sorts of reasons. But part of the reason for the rapid progress of these particular pages up the Google search ranking is because I thought about keywords when I wrote the pages.

It doesn’t matter whether you are selling products or services or trying to promote an organisation, the process is the same.

The first thing you need to do is find the keywords that people are using. For this I usually use the Google keyword selector. This is a tool designed for people who want to use the Google pay-per-click system, but provides useful information for those of us that don’t.

You enter a keyword of your choice and the programme will give you an indication of how popular this keyword was last month and on average over several months. It will also suggest alternative keywords too. So, for example, if I enter ‘kinesiology’, I discover that the search volume for that last month goes half way across the popularity bar. (Ignore the ‘advertiser competition’ column.) If you click on ‘August search volume’ – or whatever the last month happens to be - it will arrange all the search terms in order of popularity. If it arranges them from the least to the most, just click it again and it will arrange them from most to least.

Now look carefully at all the other search terms people have been using and write your page, or revamp your page accordingly. Use as many of the most popular terms as possible, but make sure it still makes sense to the visitor to the page. In particular make sure you use your target keywords in the first paragraph – a common mistake of web owners is to treat a web page like a school essay with an introduction first. Use your most important keywords in the title of the page – you’re not a newspaper journalist trying to write catchy, intriguing headlines. I see titles on web pages such as ‘Do something new’ or ‘Help Is At Hand’. The search engine computers pay a lot of attention to the title of your page, and these cryptic titles just don’t work; they don’t give any clue as to the content of the page.

So, back to our example of looking up ‘kinesiology’, another very popular term is ‘applied kinesiology’, but maybe you are not an applied kinesiologist, so you may want to include in your page how your kinesiology is different from applied kinesiology. There are other phrases that could be useful too ‘kinesiology testing’, ‘kinesiology training’, ‘kinesiology association’ and ‘kinesiology federation’. The search terms that show up will relate to searches done in your country so may be different to these.

I have found the easiest and most natural way to put lots of search terms into a web page is to look at all the places I have used ‘it’, ‘I’ , ‘they’ etc. and see if it is possible to replace these with the popular search terms.

So, here’s an example of how a couple of sentences on your web site might look without thinking about search terms:

Kinesiology can help people with a wide range of health problems. It is a form of complementary therapy.

Here they are revamped:

Kinesiology can help people with a wide range of health problems. Kinesiology testing is a form of complementary therapy.

A small change means that you are using two different popular search terms and that you are using your main search term - kinesiology twice.

You can get more sophisticated and look at other search terms too. For example, in the last piece I’ve used the term ‘complementary therapy’, so if I go back to the Google tool, I can put ‘complementary therapy’ on one line and then ‘alternative medicine’ on the next line in the search box, and find out which is preferred by web surfers. It turns out that in the UK last month, more people used the term ‘alternative medicine’, so I might want to change the phrase in the second sentence to that.

If you’re a homeopath, check out which is the most popular term ‘homeopath’ or ‘homeopathic practitioner’. When you know that, use the more popular term more often in what you write.

What about the sort of problems you work with? Do you deal with people who are stressed a lot? Put ‘stress’ into the Google tool, and see what other terms are popular – people are searching on ‘symptoms of stress’, ‘work related stress’ etc., so you could include these phrases in your description of what you do, rather than using words like ‘I’ and ‘it’.

Now you’ve read all this, have a look at my opening two paragraphs about those water retention tablets:

A nutritional tablet called Colladeen can help many people suffering from fluid retention. It's a natural water retention treatment.

Fluid retention (also known as oedema and odema) is a big problem for a lot of women.

I hope this gives you some ideas for the sort of things you can do to make your web pages work for you. (The CD set we sell on Small Business Success includes more ideas of how to have a search engine friendly site to attract more new clients.)