Are You Making the Most of Your SEO?

When you talk about SEO, the usual focus of conversation involves how to get your website to the top of Google’s organic listings. Depending on your keywords and how competitive your market is, this can be easier said than done and this can lead to people taking out Adwords campaigns to drive traffic their way while they wait for their site to rank organically.

While it is obviously important for your website to rank highly for relevant, high traffic terms, restricting your efforts to solely a handful of primary keywords can lead to you overlooking one or two easy wins that are available with just a little effort and no expenditure. If you are still waiting to see the fruits of your labour in organic search, let’s see how you can effectively drive traffic towards your site in the meantime.

Hit the Longtail

This isn’t going to change your business overnight, granted, but hitting relevant longtail keywords can be a really easy win. Use a combination of blogging and optimising pages to hit these terms and you will ensure that you are swallowing up all of the supplementary traffic that is relevant to your site. So how do you find them?

  • Fire up Google and type in one of your key terms. Then simply make a note of the phrases Google comes up with in its suggested search.
  • Head over to ehow, the notorious content site. Type in one of your keywords and it will come up with pages of related articles that they have written on the subject. They have computers and complicated algorithms that are built just to find the biggest hitting terms, so pinching a few of their titles and then writing your own article will certainly help to get you valuable visibility.
  • Type your main keyphrase into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If Google thinks that a phrase is relevant to yours then this will not only help you to optimise for an important related keyphrase, it will also add valuable content that Google acknowledges as being related to one of your main keyphrases.

Optimise Your Images

You might think that this is a bit of a pain, but giving all of your images a good title and alt tag could well get you a free bit of visibility. More and more frequently Google is including the top 3-5 results from its image search on the first page of the SERPs, so if you’re having trouble getting your main site reaching the giddy heights of page one, you might just be able to get some of your images well ranked.

Optimise every image with relevant keyphrases, surround them with text that contains the same phrases and with a bit of time and effort, you might just find an effective way of drawing in that hard to reach traffic.

Google Merchant Center

This last one is a bit of a faff but is also well worth your time. If you run an ecommerce site then this is an absolute must as it means that your products will appear in Google’s shopping section. Just like with images, Google are also including shopping results in the main organic listings, so taking a bit of time to submit a feed may well return some positive traffic numbers.

Going through the intricacies of setting up your feed will take more space than I have in this article, but visit Google’s Merchant Center and it will get you started.

Even if your site hasn’t quite reached the dizzy heights of page one, there are still many ways in which you can draw traffic to your site without resorting to an Adwords campaign. Making the most of the tools that Google provides and having a well optimised website will ensure that you will find the traffic that many of your competitors may be ignoring.

Tags

Help us spread the word.

Your Comments Are Valuable - Join The Discussion!

 

Copyright 2011 Virtuosi Media Inc.