Top Ten Traffic Building Tips For Your Website

By Alex Faiers

Why is it necessary to optimise a web site?

Basically, web site optimisation is directly related to your ranking with a search engine, which as we all know is hugely important to consumers and clients alike. Here are the top ten tips to get your website promoted to the top:

1. Firstly, it is important to use the standards compliant W3C Code for your website. This will ensure that the search engines are quickly able to read your website which will mean faster and more efficient loading and displaying of your content.
2. It may sound obvious but keep your website to the point and logical! A site that clearly fulfils what it sets out to inform about, will be easier to find by the search engines as it does what it says on the tin! This will then match up to the Meta tags in the code used to build the site which the search engines will recognise and reward you for with better rankings.
3. Try to build a selection of reciprocal links to other related websites. With these, the search engines recognise that you offer even more information on certain topics via other websites and vice versa. It all adds to the impression of being a quality, informative and trusted authority site for your chosen subject.
4. Offering a 'site map' within your website is also advisable. This allows easy access to all areas of your website, even the more obscure or un-promoted parts. It also offers alternative ways of accessing all parts of the website rather than just with the home page navigation, all adding to the ease of use and simplicity of navigation which the search engines acknowledge.
5. Again, this may sound obvious, but make sure that each page of your website is clearly labelled and titled. Individually titled pages offer visitors an instant guide to the content each page is going to cover. Clear and concise, the search engines love it!
6. The design of your website can also have an affect. The colours should be well chosen, web safe colours. The use of colours should, where possible, help to present a coherent, logical navigation system. The same goes for your choices and usage of fonts. Try to keep uniformity throughout the site. And for SEO always try to have a text-based navigation system.
7. Sometimes less is more. Excessive use of banners or noisy flash elements that offer no real purpose can work negatively for your site. Think carefully about what elements add to your content. Well placed images and clever animations that inform are plus points, but it can work the other way too! User friendliness is the key.
8. Make sure that you are optimizing the website correctly for what you want to achieve. You can do lots of work to enable great search engine results based on some obscure key words which might provide you with plenty of visitors. But if you are after real customers or clients, are they ever going to find you? What are they going to be looking for? Make sure that you focus on the right areas for them as they are the ones that matter!
9. Be wary of your keyword frequency. If you have disproportionate numbers of keywords associated to your site, it can work against you with the search engines. The number of keywords is measured against the length of text and if your site is stuffed full of your keywords, it can be banned for spam so make sure that your keywords really are relevant and covered off in content without going over the top.
10. And lastly, make sure that your website code includes the basics of Meta tags, such as 'site title', 'site description' and 'key words' etc as these are essential for search engines to read. Back these up with your H1 and H2 tags using your relevant keywords and you are on to a winner.

About the Author
Alex Faiers is one of the founders of Addictivity, a London based web design agency providing online marketing and search engine optimisation services to their worldwide client base.

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