What are the SEO strategies to generate traffic? There’s a variety of SEO – (search engine optimisation) tactics you can use for free traffic. Depending on your topic/niche, it can take months or even years before you can get traction. In a less competitive niche, SEO can have a much faster effect on your traffic from even small changes on your website. However if your topic is a competitive one, you will need to do a lot more if your goal is free traffic from the search engines.
Some basic SEO strategies include:
- Blogging
- Link building
- Optimising – images, titles and content for specific keywords
- Niche websites – building a website around a specific keyword
If you’re a blogger, one of the best ways to optimise your posts is to get an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, for example. This plugin helps you write SEO friendly content, use your keywords in your images, headings and content for the best results.
SEO Strategies To Generate Traffic: Blogging
Blogging is a well know strategy you can use to generate more traffic to your website. As your content grows, it’s a major signal to the search engines that you are an authority in your field. If you target long tail keywords within your blog posts, you can have more chance of getting your content ranking more quickly. Shorter keywords tend to be more competitive and therefore much more difficult to rank for.
To find these “low hanging fruit” keywords you can use Google’s free keyword planner. Just type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner and you’ll see hundreds or even thousands of related keywords which are already being searched for on Google. By finding the long tail keywords which offer less competition than most, bloggers can more easily get free traffic through ranking more highly on page 1 of the SERPS – search engines results pages.
Long tail keywords are those which contain more than 3 keywords. While shorter tail keywords generally have less. See also short tail and long tail keywords. Generally speaking the more keywords in your blog title, the less competition you’ll find in the SERPS for that particular phrase.
SEO Strategies To Generate Traffic: Link Building
Link building is another major signal to Google (and other search engines) which helps determine how to rank your content. If you look at the top ranking websites you will usually find they have thousands of back links pointing to them from other sites.
Backlinks are pretty important and there’s a few ways to build them. Start with your content. If your content is of high quality, people who find it will be much more likely to refer to it as a resource and therefore link to it naturally over time. This gives a natural link profile which is what Google looks for in a high quality website.
Other more spammy link building practices can give the opposite effect and if Google sees an unnatural link profile, it’s less likely to reward the site owner with a high rank for it. So link building should be done with care. Other methods of link building include:
- Guest blogging – creating content for other website owners in your niche in exchange for a backlink
- Blog commenting – some blogs allow you to leave a comment and a link to your website
- Forum posting – join in discussions on forums in your niche and leave links in your comments.
Since Google will look for quality back links as well as the quantity of them, it’s important to find other high authority websites to write guest posts for in your niche.
SEO Strategies To Generate Traffic: Optimising
Optimising your website for SEO might be the only thing you do if you have another marketing strategy which is your main focus. Blogging is a very slow and long term strategy which doesn’t produce results quickly. But, over time blogging can really help your SEO as your content grows. Once you hit a high number of blog posts, Google will give you an uptick in traffic.
Whether you’re a blogger or not, you can optimise existing content to improve your SEO score. Use Yoast SEO for WordPress to help you write SEO friendly content and optimise existing content.
You can also use a company called SEM Rush to help you with content optimisation and data research to get the most from your website.
Niche Websites
A niche website is a website which is built around a specific idea or keyword. With a niche website, you can give yourself a head start when it comes to ranking in the SERPS for your main keywords. Although keyword domains carry less weight than they used to with Google and rankings, they can still have an effect on how quickly and easily you can rank a website.
This is particularly true if you pick a longer tail keyword which has low competition in the search results pages. If you were to choose a very competitive keyword to build a website around, it will have less chance because you’ll be competing with higher authority domains in your topic.
This website, for example is a niche website and was built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors.
For more on this topic, see micro niche website.