Supercharge Your SEO Traffic

The key word to SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the word "optimization". If you look at optimization as an end point, it involves copious amounts of details and nuances. If you look at optimization as a process -- a never ending destination -- Then you only need to focus on constantly improving. The process of optimization involves constant and never-ending improvements. Split testing should at least be considered as a strategy

So how specifically do you skyrocket your search engine traffic from SEO?

There are two types of SEO; internal, and external.

Internal SEO is about your end of it. The website itself, the formatting, reducing and eliminating format errors, avoiding penalties from bad practices, a pleasurable experience for your users, relevant content, efficient site speed, integration with mobile, w3 validator to optimize and correct coding errors, using cache and other strategies to increase site speed, utilizing multimedia and tags, correct siloing (WordPress usually does this automatically if you select relevant categories and tags), and everything else. Inbound anchoring and texts, relevancy of outbound and inbound links to the topic. Quality of the outbound websites you link to, authority and link juice (influenced largely by external SEO to your specific pages and home page) of your own site's pages that link inbound to your own pages. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or using related vocabulary to the subject matter and so on.

External SEO is a little over rated but it is what a lot of people focus on. Basically it's about getting links from external places to link back to you. You can branch out and post at article directories and guest blogging or you can focus on marketing strategy or even blog commnt. A marketing strategy for External SEO is designed to get people to spread your link. It is also about trying to control anchor text to organically match the content without "over optimizing". In other words, not spamming anchor text to boost search engine ranking. This can also be stated as "natural link building".

The best way to SEO in my opinion is to focus on the user and focus on a marketing campaign almost as if the search engine didn't exist. The search engine algorithms are gradually going to be adjusted to improve the experience of the user so focus on that end point. If you get SEO traffic you should look at it as a bonus and natural consequence of doing things right. However, there are exceptions. Since Google wants a positive experience for the user, this means headlines should appear to be pleasing to the user which means headline grabbers provided you don't disappoint. A combination of on page SEO AND writing good headlines is very important. The other exception is viral marketing campaigns and strategies designed to get people to link to you. Holding contests for example is a good way to get people to improve backlinks once you have developed some traffic.



The click through rate and bounce rate plays a role. If Google is showing a lot of impression of your web page and you aren't getting them to click through to your web page, you probably need to optimize your headline more for attention and less for search engines. Market to humans and select a good, marketable headline, but make things easy for the search engine too. Use your keyword in the headline and consider using it in different formats or related terms in different formats without spamming. appropriate italicized, bold, headers, quotations and so on might have a mild effect provided you aren't keyword stuffing. If people are clicking away immediately after viewing your website it is not a good experience for the user so you probably need to work on that.

Ultimately you need a process that over time helps you narrow down what's important. A lot of times you aren't going to have any idea why some posts get 3,000 views and other posts get 56 viewers. So the process of testing lots of things and doing more of what appears to be working and less of what doesn't until you can conclusively determine A is better than B is a good strategy. That requires doing a lot of stuff and seeing what is successful and repeatedly trying to recreate your success. That means tinkering with new headlines but very similar content/topics, similar headlines but different topics, similar backlinking strategy but other different things and so on. If you can conclusively determine based upon your many tests which variable had more success you can try that moving forward. As you do this more and more you can focus on detail.

The point is you need to have a process of constant improvement. When you don't know how to improve things you can simply try a bunch of new stuff until the direction sorts itself out through this process.