After months of meetings and hard work your new website is finally live, congratulations! But don't celebrate for too long as the hard work has just begun. Building a great website is just the first step to increasing your traffic and ultimately your sales. Your new site won't be so great if nobody visits it. An optimized website will attract the right visitors, educate them, and convince them to convert; whether that is by buying a product, signing up for an event, or submitting a contact form. Implementing an inbound marketing strategy is essential for anybody that wants to increase their sales and grow their website traffic.
Optimizing your website and building an inbound marketing strategy may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. With the right tool and guidance anybody can successfully increase their website traffic and sales. Below are 3 tips to get found online faster:
1. Build Inbound links
Off-page search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most influential factors in increasing your ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. Off-page SEO consists of building links from quality high ranking websites back to your website. Having links back to your website indicate to search engines that your site has authority as many quality sites find your website relevant to link to.
Some great ways to build inbound links include:
- Submitting your website to online directories
- Writing guest posts for other blogs
- Create profiles and recurring content on top social websites
2. Optimize your website content
While off-page SEO is very important, you can't forget about on-page SEO. On-page SEO consists of optimizing the content on your website for relevant keywords that you want to rank high for on search engines.
To ensure you are optimizing your pages correctly:
- Pick a primary keywork for each page
- Place primary keywords in your page headers
- Include keywords in the body content, but do not overstuff the content to the point of it sounding unnatural
3. Create an XML sitemap
An xml sitemap helps search engines crawl your site and sift through your web pages more efficiently. An XML sitemap is a simple file containing a list of all of your pages including links, importance, and how often they are updated. Many content management systems have modules or plugins that automatically create a sitemap and keep it updated as you create new content. If that is not an option, then you can find sitemap generators online for free. Simply take the .xml that it outputs and upload it to the root of your website. Just make sure that update your xml file at least once a month so that search engines always have the freshest data.
This article has just scratched the surface of how to increase sales and traffic for your website. If you would like more information, click the button below to download our free comprehensive ebook that covers 25 website 'must haves' for driving traffic, leads & sales.
