Five Tips for Increasing Your Website Traffic

Okay, you’ve researched your keywords and determined what people are searching for. Here are five quick and easy tips to use those keywords to increase your website traffic.

Tip #1 Make sure you’re actually tagging your keywords.

Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your content and then neglect to tag them on your web page? Tags are where search engines look and if there are no tags they’ll pass right by your web pages. Here’s a brief intro to tags.

There are several types of tags. These include:

* Title tags. Title tags are the most important place to use your keywords. This tag is in the header portion of your source code and does not show on your website page. Each and every page of your website should have a different title tag.

* Header Tags. Header tags are next in order of importance to search engines. There are h1, h2, h3 etc header tags that can be used on a page. The h1 header tag is the most important. This text does show on your web page and should be different on each page. Unfortunately, a lot of people waste the h1 tag by having it read something of no value to the search engines such as “Welcome to our site.”

* Meta Tags. Meta tags are also shown in your source code but not on the web page itself. The most important meta tag is the “description” which should be a brief statement telling what your page is about. Some search engines use this description when your page shows up in a search. The keywords meta tag is of little importance and most search engines ignore it.

* Alt Tags. Alt tags are used to provide a text description of a graphic. Each graphic on your site should have a description and an alt tag. These show up when someone runs their mouse over a graphic or picture.

Tip #2 Add content to your site regularly

Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking. Content is what search engine spiders look for and index. Without it, there’s nothing to index or rank. Make a commitment to provide regular, optimized content and your traffic will soar. Here it is in the middle of July and many of you still have Father’s Day featured on your website. That tells the search engines that your site isn’t important enough for you to update so isn’t important enough to them to rank it high.

Tip #3 Obtain valuable and relevant incoming links

The more websites which link to your web pages, the more valuable search engines perceive you to be. Having said that, let me add that not all links are created equal. Search engines give more leverage to links from sites which are popular and credible and from sites which are relevant to your website topic. For example, if your site sells gift baskets, a link from a site that features travel to China isn’t very relevant UNLESS that web page is a gift basket related to China in some way. Also, if you’re using a “I’ll link to you if you link to me” method of obtaining links, these types of links have little value since this method has been abused so long.

You can encourage linking to your website by:

* Adding content to your site.
* Submitting to article and niche directories.
* Publishing press releases.
* Blogging and participating in social networking forums, chat rooms and social networking sites.

Tip #4 Be Social!

Now more than ever before, internet marketing is about building a community. If used right, social networking can increase links and traffic to your website. There are plug-ins that can be used to post your blog posts on facebook and twitter if you are using wordpress for your site.

Get involved and begin participating. There are forums that cater to the gift and gift basket industry industry. Our community and forum at Gift Retailers Connection Forum is an excellent example.

Tip #5 Advertise for more exposure and traffic

Advertising, when handled strategically, can be used to promote your content and products or services. However, you must be careful to understand how best to use an advertising venue for your purpose or you could end up spending more money than you can afford with little return. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is often the tool of choice because you control the advertising budget on a daily basis and have the tools to test and track your advertising efforts.

When using other forms of advertising, make sure that you are advertising where your potential customers hang out.

None of these five tips are magic wands that will instantly bring results. But if used properly and regularly, you should see increases in the traffic to your web pages. Then, the next step is writing those pages so that the customer will realize that they just have to have your product and can’t do without it.