Master Your SEO For More Traffic

If you desire to generate business using your website, one thing you need is traffic to your website.

You can have the best designed website in the world, one that can entice your visitors to open their wallets, but if you get no traffic that site doesn’t do you any good.

The value of your website is the amount of traffic times the conversion rate times the value per customer. If any one of these is 0, you have a serious problem.

Creating Visibility

One of the ways you can get more traffic to your website is to take advantage of search engines. When your site shows up in the search results your business becomes visible. At this point, it has the opportunity to begin a relationship with the searcher.

Showing up in the search results is not enough though. The way your site is presented to the searcher is important. Does that initial presentation help create a click?

The relationship truly begins with the click. Until then, your presence in the search results is just words on a page mixed in with other words on a page.

In the search results there are 3 important pieces of information relative to each result.  These are the Title, the URL, and the Description.

The Title Tag

The title is the first line. It’s in a larger font. It’s the part that the searcher will click to visit your site.

You can define the title of each page in your website. So make each one unique and use this space like a headline, something that will grab the searchers attention — relative to their search!

One thing that the search engines do to support you is that they display the searched words in bold. So, in this example, the search phrase “leadership training” stands out.

You get to display about 60 characters, so make them good!

The URL

The URL is the website address. It shows in green beneath the title.

By the time you are looking at search engine optimization your domain, i.e. your URL, is probably well-established. If you are just starting out with a new business, then pick important keywords (the words someone searches for) for your domain.

The reason is that if there is a keyword match, your URL will show up in bold too. Plus it’s easy for a searcher to believe a website is relevant to their search when the search words are right there in the name.

While you can change the title and description of every page on your website, once the domain is set, it’s difficult (and often not wise) to change that.

And, though you can change the URL of specific pages, that can also create problems. (If you insist on changing the URL of pages, or update an entire site, see this video about using redirects so you don’t lose your previous progress.)

The Meta Description

The description is the main body of the search results text. It tells the story of your business to the searcher. Once again, the searched words will be displayed in bold.

Use the description as a mini advertisement to entice the reader to click to your site. You might want to make a promise here that gets fulfilled when they click.

The Meta Description can be about 160 characters. Each page of your website is unique so each description should be unique as well, focused on the main benefit of that particular page.

Of course, you may want visitors to begin their journey at the home page of your site, but often another page is a better match for their search. For that reason, every page ought to deliver on the overall promise of your site as well as the specific promise that the page offers in the title and description.

Is This Search Engine Optimization?

Indeed, modifying the title and description of your website is part of the important “on page” SEO for your site.

There is more to search engine optimization than adjusting the titles and descriptions, but this is an area that many businesses miss because these two elements are invisible on the page.

Yet these two elements are so important because they can influence the search engines in determining your site’s relevance to the searcher’s request. And they can influence the searcher by giving them a reason to click.

By optimizing just the title and the description of each page you can achieve major improvements in traffic to your site.