Low Cost Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Site

The first step is to get your website HTML correctly coded to attract Google and the other search engines.

So, you first have to decide who you are targeting and how they will find you.

You need to do some keyword research and find out what people are looking for. Search Google for 'free keyword research tool' and take your pick of the results to help you with your keyword list. The more specific the keywords, the better e.g.mail order silk parachute' rather than just parachutes'

Once you have some keywords you should Google' them and check out the number of search results that appear. Be sure to search the keywords in inverted commas e.g. "keywords"

These results are your competition. You should really select keywords with a high volume of searches but fewer results on Google. Up to 2000 results would be a very good keyword to target but you can have more results and still get in the top 10 - it depends on the quality of the results. If the top 10 is full of BBC or similar sites then its unlikely you'll be able to break into it.

Now you have your target keywords you have to add them to your site. This is quite a simple process if you know what you're doing, otherwise you can ask your web designer to do it for you.

Lets assume your target keyword is "how to build a shed" .

You need to add this keyword in the page title tag first of all. Make it something like "how to build a shed in 5 easy steps" or "how to build a shed without breaking sweat"

Next is the headline tag or H1 as it appears in the code. Try to make the phrase start the headline, with a similar line to the title possibly. You can also use other H tags like H2, H3 further down the page.

Next, you should ensure you use your keyword throughout the copy on your site - but don't overuse it. An ideal page would be 400+ words long with your keyword at 2-3% density i.e. used 8 - 12 times on the page. Try to start the first paragraph with the keyword and use it evenly over the page thereafter.

Another tag that search engines look at is the image tag. Check your images (banners, photos etc.) on your site and add a keyword tag to them.

This will mean people will find your site when searching by Google or yahoo images too. The meta tags (keywords & descriptions) should include your keywords but these tags are not so effective any more, at least as far as Google is concerned.

This is about as much as you can do to the html code to optimize it and is only a rough guide. Keyword research is vital to the success of any website and there are more techniques than just those described here.

Next we'll look at the off-page strategies to increase your search engine traffic (and they are much more powerful!)

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