5 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

 

5 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

 

By: Matt Bacak

Earlier this year, Google rolled out its Panda and Penguin updates to its algorithms. Google essentially adjusted the website ranking of those websites with poor quality content (Panda) or those spamming Google with keyword stuffing, linking schemes or using duplicate content (Penguin). The end result was many website owners who didn’t follow Google’s rules found their sites dropping in rankings.

How your website ranks in the search engines is the driving force of free traffic.

You can capitalize on this YouTube strategy of driving more traffic by making dozens of videos that demonstrate your product or service. Targeted videos that answer the top 10 questions your customers want answered is another way to get visitors to your website.

Here are 5 ways you can learn from others’ mistakes:

1. Fine tune your keywords:  There are numerous tools on the internet that you can use to identify your website’s keywords. To increase your chances of ranking for keywords, focus on 3 or 4 word keyword phrases rather than one word keyword. As mentioned in a previous post, large organizations have teams in place to rank for (and maintain) the top spots with one-word keywords. Keyword phrases like “auto insurance deductible” shows a lot of websites competing for this keyword phrase. The search of “auto insurance deductibles” did reveal the phrase “what is a deductible” with little competition.  A new keyword search of “what is a deductible” resulted in dozens of keyword phrases with significantly lower competition.  Your goal is to aim for 5 to 10 keyword phrases per product or offering.

2. Make a short video:  Google owns YouTube so videos produced and uploaded on YouTube have a good chance of ranking high in Google’s results.  Once you’ve identified your 5 to 10 keyword phrases, create a short 30 to 60 second video for each keyword phrase. Experiment with different types of videos such as cartoons, video doodling, animation, sock puppets or plain text. Track which videos get hits and repeat the process. You can talk over the video or just use a music file (be sure to follow the copyright rules). Make sure to include a call to action on the last slide such as “for more tips visit our website (show URL)”.

3. Share your video(s) with everyone:  The key to getting a lot of views on your YouTube video is to share the video on all your social media sites and ask your friends to share it with their friends. You can start by uploading the video to Facebook and share it with those friends and then Tweet about the video. If you already have a mailing list you can email the video link to your list and ask them to post comments or questions. Finally, you can pin a picture of your video’s thumbnail onto Pinterest.

4. Add backlinks to your video:  Backlinks are important for ranking which in turn brings visitors to your site. You want authentic, credible backlinks, though, spread over a few days and not thousands of less than credible backlinks all at one time. There are many websites that will create backlinks to your video site; it’s important that the backlinks be directed to YouTube or Facebook and not your blog as both YouTube and Facebook are considered authority sites. Once customers are at your YouTube or Facebook site, redirect them from YouTube and Facebook to your website (by saying “for more tips go to our website (show URL)”). Be sure to include backlinks from .edu and .gov sites as well.

5. Use your YouTube video as a video response to an already popular video on YouTube: Google, which owns YouTube, gives other peoples’ comments a lot of weight in the search engine rankings. You can take this one step further by finding a popular video in your niche and posting a video response to the popular video. Others will see your video response and may be intrigued enough to check out your YouTube channel.

You don’t have to create all the videos yourself; you can hire others to create them for you. Often, short videos in 30 to 60 second duration are enough to peak viewers’ interest. Be sure to create a lot of videos (with the hopes of one or more going viral) and watch your traffic increase.

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