If you want to learn how to increase organic traffic, these are the most important things to apply right now:
1. Identify your website’s bad & good links
2. Remove and disavow bad backlinks
3. Blog about your user’s questions and problems
4. Be a contributor on reputable sites in your industry
5. Do keywords research and create a keyword database
6. Optimize your meta data and content
7. Create quality content on a regular basis
8. Create a powerful internal linking system
9. Encourage readers to link to your website
10. Monitor your SEO progress and the incoming links
Looks simple, right?
Let’s move to the science part of increasing organic visits.
1. Identify your website’s bad & good links
For the last years, backlinks have been the essential element of SEO. Even though some rumors claim that their value will decrease in the future, some Googlers (including Matt Cutts) have confirmed that links will remain the major ranking factor for the coming years.
Sure, you can get traffic from Google, without many links, or with just a few of them, but the truth is you’ll never be able to compete with the authoritative sites in your industry, without building or earning quality backlinks.
If you are serious about improving organic traffic for a site, you have to know what backlinks are helping you with SEO and the ones that are a threat for your rankings. I assume you already know that not all backlinks are good, and search engine optimization is not about the number of links you have.
To get good results with SEO and continuously improve your organic traffic, you have to analyze all your site’s backlinks and compare their value. Once identified your best backlinks, try to get more of the same.
These are some of the most important elements of a good backlink:
- The link is from a relevant website in your industry
- Contextual links are best for SEO and also for driving traffic
- Links from a long and detailed article will carry more value
- The backlink is dofollow. For organic traffic growth, only dofollow links will count.
- The backlink was added by an editor and was not automatically built
- The link is from a site with a good domain authority and a trusted source
2. Remove and disavow bad backlinks
You can improve your rankings in Google by getting rid of the bad backlinks. It’s inevitable to avoid bad links. All websites have some, including popular and trusted sites. The more bad links a website has, the harder it will be to increase its rankings and get more organic traffic. Too many low-quality links can even cause Google penalties.
After going through the first step and analyzing all your links, you can tag all the ones you consider them to be bad.
These are the steps to follow to clean up your bad links:
a. After analyzing your backlinks, you have to tag the links you think are bad, and you want to remove. You can tag them in Monitor Backlinks by clicking on the small icon on the left of each row. Then click on “edit”.
A window will pop up, and there you can tag the link and click “submit”. I usually tag the bad links with the word “bad”, so I can easily find them later.
b. Once tagged all the bad links, you can find them using the filters button. Click on “tags” and select the tag you’ve used for the links you want to remove.
c. Now that you’ve created a list of your bad links, you’ll have to try to remove them. Do email outreach and send a request to the webmasters to remove the backlink to your website.
Don’t get discouraged if you’ll fail to remove most of them, it happens often. Monitor Backlinks will automatically check the status of your links daily and will send you email alerts if any of them is deleted. Therefore, you won’t have to check manually if the links are removed.
d. With the backlinks you couldn’t remove, create a disavow report and submit it to the Google Disavow Tool.
3. Blog about your user’s questions and problems
If you have an online business, surely you’ll get a lot of questions from your potential or existing clients. Even if you have a content-based website, people will have questions that need answers. Instead of giving a short reply to each question by email, it’s best to write a detailed article covering the problems and concerns of your users.
Why?
Because people tend to type the same questions in Google, and it would be great if your website would come up on the first results with a solution to their problems. That’s a great way to drive targeted organic traffic.
4. Be a contributor on reputable sites in your industry
One of the best ways to promote your website is to become a contributor on the most popular websites from your niche. This is how you can get your website in front of an already established community and potentially get referring traffic, but also a backlink that will have a positive impact on your SEO.
Be aware that guest blogging on low-quality websites might have a negative impact instead. Therefore, you have to be very selective when choosing the website you are writing for.
5. Do keywords research and create a keyword database
Keywords research is a very important process for search engine optimization as it can tell you the exact phrases people are using to search on Google. Whenever you write a new blog post, you have to check the most popular keywords, but don’t be obsessed by the search volume. Sometimes, long tail keywords are more valuable, and you can rank for them more easily.
The best way to find keywords is still with the Google keyword tool.
6. Optimize your meta data and content
The first thing Google looks at a website is the meta data and the presence of keywords in the first paragraphs of your content. If your meta data contains information about the user’s queries, your website has higher chances to rank higher.
These are some of the things to optimize for better organic traffic:
- Optimize meta titles, descriptions, and keywords
- Optimize images titles, ALT, and description
- Add your most important keywords in the first paragraphs but avoid keyword stuffing
7. Create quality content on a regular basis
You’ve heard it a million times. Content is king. That’s true, quality content will naturally attract backlinks, social media shares and overall improve the user experience on your site.
Good content is not enough anymore. Your articles have to be outstanding and must be much better than the one of your competitors. Don’t write just and useless articles just for the sake of publishing something new. Instead, concentrate on quality and make your content stand out from the crowd. The competition is increasing as we speak, and quality will be the only way to succeed.
8. Create a powerful internal linking system
The easiest ways to create backlinks to your existing articles or sales pages is by using a good internal linking system. By linking to relevant posts you’ve written before you can build quality links and use the anchor text you prefer. These links are valuable for SEO, but will also keep your readers spend more time on your site.
9. Encourage readers to link to your website
As I said at the beginning of the article, more naturally earned backlinks, will help you get more organic traffic and improve SEO. You can suggest your readers to link back to your website by having a small widget at the bottom of your posts. Just as you have the social media sharing links, an embedded linking widget will increase the chances to get more backlinks.
However, don’t directly ask anyone to link to your website. The goal is to make it easy for others to link to your website, and not force them to do so.
10. Monitor your SEO progress and the incoming links
Organic traffic acquisition and SEO is a never ending process. No matter how much traffic you have now and how well you are doing with search engine optimization, you should never neglect and ignore the SEO progress.
Always monitor how the organic traffic is evolving from week to week and analyze what has worked best and what didn’t. With time, your website will attract backlinks, and all of them have to be analyzed. Every month, do a new analysis of the new links and see if the ones you received lately are good or bad for SEO.
With the Monitor Backlinks SEO tool, you can automate the reporting process and ease things up for you. Every week you’ll get SEO progress reports automatically. More importantly, when your site earns or loses links, you’ll be informed.
These are the most important things to do to increase your website’s organic traffic. What’s working best for you? Let me know in the comments section below.
Here is another useful article from our partners: How Long Does SEO Take?
Author: Felix Tarcomnicu
Courtesy: www.monitorbacklinks.com
