What Can I Do About My Website Woes?

There's a lot of bad advice floating around about how to boost website traffic.

SEO strategies that worked just a few years ago will now earn you a quick trip to the very bottom of the search engine heap.

So how do you fix your struggling website and get more visitors -- without dropping a bundle of cash on Google ads?

SEO in the Penguin/Panda Age

Let's get this out of the way first: SEO is not about stuffing your site with keywords. In fact, stuffing your site with keywords is a great way to get Google to shove you so far down in the search rankings that no one will ever find your site.

That's not to say that keywords aren't important. You still need to choose relevant ones for each page of your site, but they have to fit naturally into your content. Remember: You're writing for people, not search engine robots. By creating high-quality, relevant content for your site, your keywords should just naturally fit into the flow.

Good places to put your keywords include page titles, headers, meta tags, and links (all of these within reason). Don't dump huge lists of keywords in your meta tags, or anywhere else on your site.

Backlinks

Another good strategy for building website traffic is getting quality backlinks from other sites. The amount of outside sites that link to yours help Google determine how popular your site is -- and if those links come from sites that Google trusts, they can help boost your search rankings.

Here, too, you need to be careful: If you just have a bunch of friends’ link to your site, all using the same anchor text (like a keyword), Google views that as potential spam and may penalize you for it.

The best backlink strategy is to have a variety of sites link back to you, using different anchor text -- and the way to make that happen is to give them something great to link to. With that in mind:

Offer Great Content

Your most important traffic-boosting strategy is just to make sure you provide a lot of quality content on topics that interest your target audience (in other words, potential customers). A blog is a fantastic way to keep fresh content on your site -- Google, especially, loves blogs.

You can also post how-to articles for using your products; videos; case studies of happy customers; a monthly podcast...anything your potential customers might find interesting and want to share with others. You don't have to produce a ton of content all the time, but you should be adding new content to your site on a regular basis to keep both the search engines and your audience interested.

Many small business owners struggle to find the time to keep fresh, engaging content on their websites. If you're too busy to write a blog or add new content on a weekly basis, consider outsourcing the work to a freelance writer.

Work Your Social Networks

Once you've got great content on your site, it's time to share it -- and encourage others to do the same. Social media is huge these days; if your business doesn't have, at bare minimum, a Twitter profile and maybe a Facebook page, you might be leaving a lot of money behind.

The key to using your social networks effectively is engagement. Don't just spam your followers with constant links to your products; this will only make most of them unfollow you in a hurry.

Instead, post interesting and relevant content from around the web. Tweet a news article your customers would find fascinating or helpful. Find interesting people related to your niche, follow them, and retweet their links.

These things will help build your online reputation, and ensure that people will see you and your company in a positive light. This will also encourage them to start sharing your content with their followers.

Many small businesses struggle to bring traffic to their websites.

With great content and a little legwork, your website can turn into a constant source of new customers.