Increase your web traffic with free search engine optimisation (SEO) tips
This is a very simple guide to help you improve your website performance yourself and are a very good way to start to increase your web traffic.
If you are not the DIY type than please call us on 020 7269 9999 and we will be happy to advise you on how to drive more high quality visitors to your site.
A great many companies spend time and money on building a website but don't know how effective it is and what they should do to improve traffic and its contribution to the business.
The basic steps covered here are:
- Install and understand your Google Analytics statistics
- Make your pages and content visible to Google through Search Engine Optimisation
- Use Link Building to improve your Google Page Rank and appear higher up in search results
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Step 1 Install Google Analytics on every page and regularly check, understand and act upon your statistics
Google Analytics is a free service that tells you most things you need to know about how well (or badly) your website is performing. From the statistics it is possible to deduce the steps you should take to improve your sites performance. |
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If you don’t have Google Analytics code installed on every page of your website get someone to install it. ( takes 30 minutes on average) Cogent Design will install your code at no cost if it takes less than an hour.
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Check your stats every week to spot good or bad trends. After a few weeks you will start to understand how well (or badly) your website is performing |
number of visits – this will vary enormously depending on your site – it should be generally heading upwards
time on site ( over 2 minutes is acceptable)
number of pages visited (over 6 is pretty good) |
Traffic sources overview shows how many visitors used a search engine to find you, how many came via a link from another site or typed your web address (or had you bookmarked)
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Date range It is useful to compare current performance with the same period last year by selecting two date ranges ( not shown in this graphic) |
Bounce rate ( a bounce is where someone visits your site and leaves after seeing only one page) If your bounce rate is over 40% then too many visitors are not interested in what they found on your site i.e. the wrong visits to the wrong content. A target of 30% -35% bounce rate is reasonable
Map Overlay shows the countries and towns where your visitors come from
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| Content Overview shows how many times particular pages are visited |
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Our Recommendation - you may well find that the number of visitors to your site and the depth of their visit is worse than you thought.
You can improve the situation by taking some relatively simple steps yourself or by delegating to an internal or external resource. It is important to regularly monitor your sites performance
Step 2 Discover the most popular search terms by using the Google Keyword Tool
Key words are what potential visitors to your site are typing into Google. If you are not using these words correctly on your site they won’t find you – worse still they will find your competition who do use the correct terms. The Google keyword tool can be found within Adwords and shows you the relative popularity of various search terms and suggests alternatives. E.g. we discovered that the term “PowerPoint design” is far more popular than “Presentation Design”
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Alternative suggestions – Google suggests alternative words you could try |
Relevance We would pick this term because it accurately describes us and has a reasonable number of local searches per month |
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Popular terms It takes longer to rank highly for the most popular terms |
Adwords competition and cost This term has lots of competition so if you want to use it for an AdWords campaign it will be relatively expensive |
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Comment - Relevent keywords are important but only part of the answer - up-to-date good quality page content is even more important and Google rates good content highly when ranking a page.
Step 3 Add your new key words ( up to 65 characters) to your title bar and repeat the same words in your web text
The title of your page is important ( it is one of your meta tags). It should contain the keywords for that page and be no more than 65 characters long.
This is our home page and our keywords are: “Cogent Design B2B branding marketing graphic design agency London” |
We repeat these keywords within the visible text of the page. We use H1 tags where possible
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The site navigation should always be in HTML text ( not images) so that search engines robots can find and index your other web pages. |
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| The page title is a meta tag within the HTML code of the page. You can change it with any popular web editing software such as Dreamweaver. |
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Conclusion - there is no point in having a website that not one visits. Get to know your web stats, use them improve your site, keep monitoring and improving and start connecting with new customers.
