Jan Michaelson, Negosentro | Maintaining steady search engine traffic for your website isn’t easy, especially if you aren’t familiar with the mechanics of search engine optimization. Even if you are creating helpful, interesting content, there are many reasons why you may not be getting sufficient traffic. Here are a few of the most common reasons for a lack of search engine traffic traffic for your website, along with advice on how to optimize your content for search engines.
Lack of Indexing
One of the most common obstacles to search engine traffic is a lack of indexing. If your site isn’t indexed, you aren’t going to get traffic, and while Google and most other search engines will index sites automatically, this can take time. Your best bet is to speed up the indexing process using available tools. If you’re using Google, the XML Sitemap plugin is one good option; using it, you can submit your sitemap to Google through Webmaster tools for indexing. Also keep in mind that the more popular your content becomes, the quicker the ‘spiders’ used by Google and other search engines will index content.
Improper Keyword Usage
Keywords are crucial to optimizing search engine traffic. Do some research to find out what keywords are most relevant to your audience–i.e., what keywords are searched most frequently–and feature these keywords in content that you create. It’s also important to put these keywords into the headlines of your posts and webpages. This is due to the fact that with search engines, the keywords entered are almost always in the title of the top results, often in their entirety.
Your Content Isn’t Shareable
A little-known fact about Google: their search result rankings are affected by how frequently webpages are shared on social media. This means that if your content gets frequent shares and reposts on Facebook or Twitter, search engine rankings for your pages will increase. To take advantage of this, maintain an active social media presence and post frequently, and provide the option for readers of your content to share pages. As your followers share links, your content will be viewed on social media, which will generate search engine traffic.
Your Posts are Too Short
Another little-known SEO fact is that most search engines prefer longer, more thorough content when ranking web pages. Longer posts are shared more often, and being more thorough with your content also helps ensure that it will be helpful to your audience and thus shared more frequently. Resist the temptation to churn out shorter content, and instead focus on quality.
Your Website is Slow
If your website takes longer than five seconds or so to load, your web pages aren’t going to reach the first page of search engine results, as users will become frustrated and turn to other search results. To keep your site from running slowly, be sure to keep any image or video sizes as small as possible while still maintaining decent quality, and use WordPress for your site to take advantage of plug-ins to speed up load times.
These are just a few of the reasons that your website may not be getting enough search engine traffic. Search result optimization can be difficult, and if you’re having trouble increasing your search engine rankings, enlist the help of professionals such as SEO Sydney. While these tips can help you increase search engine traffic on your own, SEO professionals will consult you on the best ways to optimize your content for search engines and provide you with expert tips that you wouldn’t find on your own.
