Getting people to your website is critical but those people have to be the right people, so how do we increase website traffic while also ensuring the people that we’re attracting are the right people? Let’s start by assuming that honesty, integrity and quality are the three most important parts of a website and building from there.

Titles – Proper Labels Help Increase Traffic

Page titles are often overlooked in our zeal to build web traffic but by most reports they are the most important single piece of the puzzle. Your page title in located within the section of your HTML document, between the <TITLE></TITLE> tags and is piece of text displayed at the top of your web browser, within the chrome. Remember, search engines (such as Google) are robots, they use a series of math formulas to calculate the importance of your page, one of the factors they look at is the title of your page.

Make sure your page title is related to the content that you’re displaying and that the words you’ve used to display your content is key word rich. My title for example is Five Techniques to Increase Web Traffic, this is both descriptive for the article that I’ve written as well as a common search phrase in Google.

PermaLinks – Your Document Path

The second part of the puzzle for increasing your page traffic is a little known trick called PermaLinks. Usually when people write a post they save the file in HTML as something like traffic.html and store it on their website. Even my favorite publishing tool WordPress saves (by default) a document with the URL ?p=## to represent the article but what search engines are looking for is help to understand your post and what it really is.

PermaLinks come to the rescue by converting your page title Five Techniques to Increase Web Traffic to an effective path used by web browsers to display your article. In this case, my PermaLink slug is five-techniques-to-increase-web-traffic which clearly demonstrates to Google what my page is about. By using PermaLinks, Google (and other search engines) now know that my web page is located at http://www.thisismyurl.com/five-techniques-to-increase-web-traffic/ and as such, this page must have something to do with Five Techniques to Increase Web Traffic.

Headers – Using HTML for what it was made to do

A few weeks back I was in a meeting with some web designers and one young designer mentioned using the <center> tag. After I finished bludgeoning him with an available laptop, I got to thinking how amazing it is that 15 years after the rise of the Internet people still use the wrong tags. Headers are the same, they have intrinsic value but most people have no idea how (or why) to use them.

Again, let’s remember that Google is a computer and that computers are only as clever as the people who made them, then it stands to reason that the people who programmed Google followed some fairly basic rules. One such rule was the purpose of header tags in developing pages. According to that logic then, <H1>-<H6> must have a hierarchal value structure, determining the importance of content on a document.

Simply put, something in the <H1> tag must, according to HTML publishing structure be more valuable in determining what a document is about that an <H2> or <H3>. So, if you want traffic sniffing robots to know what your page is about, use the power of heading tags to help determine it.

File Tags – From Names to ALT’s

We’ve already covered the fact that the actual name (or path) of your document is important but what about the rest of your page content? Surprisingly, it’s equally critical.

Images for example should have filenames that describe the content. For example, instead of uploading an image and calling it P0234234.jpg, calling it one-tree-in-winter.jpg will assist robots in understanding and indexing your filename. Should you page be about One Tree In Winter, these robots will truly understand the relevance of the image. To add to this, placing an ALT tag in the image tag “One Tree In Winter” will further help and ensure your website is accessible to the blind.

Anchor tags are another source of information for search engines, include a title in your hyperlink which describes the target page and you’ll increase the value of the link for robots.

Content – The true king of SEO

With all this said and done, what is the best way to increase traffic to your website? Quality content.