How to Drive Traffic to Your Website With SEO

By Panah C Rad

Search engine optimization has been around for years. SEO is the art of optimizing your pages to show up higher on the search engine results pages. A lot of experts talk about SEO as being an avenue to bring free traffic to your website. In truth, no traffic is for free. As long as you spend time or money to drive traffic to your website, it is not free. Nevertheless, organic search is a wonderful channel to drive targeted traffic to your website without playing the bidding wars in the pay per click channel.

SEO may sound complicated on the surface, especially if you are not technical. But you don't have to be a computer whiz to be able to understand the organic search. Here are the steps you can take to push your site to the top of the SERPs.

Your Domain: buying the right domain can help you get a leg up on your competitors. If your domain has your core keyword in it, you have a better chance of getting ranked for that keyword.

Use LSI Keywords: Google and other search engines have started to focus more on your content/key-word relevance to determine where to rank your website. By using LSI keywords, you can show Google why your page is relevant to a specific search term.

On-Page Optimization: on-page optimization tactics (your title tags, META tags, ..) are still important. There are many things you can do to make your code and content optimized for search engines. While this step won't push you to the top of the results pages by its own, it is a must do.
Your Link Structure: your internal links do matter, and you should take time to link to your internal pages with the right keywords to help Google rank your pages properly.

Build Links: there are many ways to build links, but you want to make sure you gain quality links from authority sites. You can always gain additional links by commenting on blogs, forums or by writing articles.
Write Your Press Release: press-releases are an underrated way of gaining links online. You should use keyword-rich press releases to not only gain exposure for your site but also build links fast.

Optimize your results: you should use an analytical tool to find out what your traffic sources are and how you can improve your results. Google Analytics is a free tool that does most of the work for you.

SEO may not be for free, but as long as you spend enough time testing and optimizing your pages, you can climb the rankings and drive tons of traffic to your website without having to spend thousands of dollars on advertising.

Still not sure what to do?

Search engine optimization doesn't have to be difficult. If you are still not sure what exactly to do to drive traffic to your site, read traffic secrets to find out how you can get help optimizing your pages and finding other avenues to get visitors to your website.