If your business relies on an online presence, then you need to understand how to increase the number of visits that your website gets. It’s simple mathematics – the more visitors your site gets, the more business you have.

The question is, how do you make people visit your site?

In detail, there are so many ways to do this. However, the simplest answer would be to make your site a constant favorite for online searches.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of optimizing your website to show up for relevant searches on search engines.

In this age of fast browsing and virtual voice assistants, a lot of people rely on online searches through popular search engines (such as Google or Bing) to find products, services, and companies all over the world.

Basically, when people look for something, they just go online, enter specific keywords, and then let the search engines (like Google) do the rest. The results of the search are then displayed, and people just simply click on each item in the list of results. Naturally, the ones ranked higher in the list of results are the ones that get clicked and viewed the most. Now, as an online brand, you want your site in this list, preferably on the first page and somewhere in the top 3.

So how do you optimize your website for search engines? What do you need to do to make your site more visible to search engines and more likely for it to show up in the top search results?

The most convenient way to do this, if you can afford it, would be to hire the services of a reputable SEO Analyst or an SEO company, since such companies have the necessary tools and techniques to get your website ranking higher in the SERPs, and, more importantly, the experience to track significant changes in your website. However, if you are willing to try it on your own, then you can start with these ideas.

Improve website content

People who are serious about looking for, hiring, or buying what your company is offering are usually very thorough about the details that you put out online. Since they don’t see you face to face, they have no choice but to rely heavily on what you say on your page. This means you have to keep your website content updated, concise, and easy to understand, but also presented in an interesting and non-intimidating manner.

Remember, with plenty of other options just a click away, you only have no more than a few seconds to grab the attention and interest of each visitor. But if you can manage to get them to continue browsing, then your chances of getting a purchase are significantly better.

You should also take into consideration the persona of your target visitors so as to ensure that your site is packed with content that is easy to navigate through and use for that specific target niche. If what’s on your site is too complicated for the age group that you are targeting for instance, chances are, people will just move on to the next option on the list. So, make sure to put in effort and time in your content creation.

Focusing on your content quality also gives you a good head start when it comes to your content being shared online or ranking well on search engines. When you fill your blog or resource pages with high-quality content, you might even consider trying blogger outreach services on other relevant websites to get backlinks back to your site. Guest blogging for SEO is the process of offering guest blogs on other websites in exchange for a link back to your site, which, in turn, gets you ‘link juice’ and in consequence more traffic to your site in the longrun.

Use a unique and captivating web design

Don’t make your website look like one of those run-of-the-mill pages that people often just pass over. Generic, uninteresting designs scream cheap and lack of effort on the part of the owner, so it immediately affects your company’s credibility and reputation.

If you can, invest in a unique, attractive design that is both inviting and non-intimidating. This should make your website look attractive enough that people cannot help but peak at what’s inside. At the same time, it should be simple enough so that even the most technologically-challenged visitors would find your site comfortable enough to browse through. Remember, visitors will usually spare only a few seconds to check out your site and evaluate whether they should spend a few more minutes or if they should just move on to the next.

Use relevant keywords sufficiently

Keywords are probably one of the most important components that will make your site immediately visible to search engines. These are basically what the engines look for when compiling a list of results – whether you have the keywords on your page or not.

What Google does is it checks if the keywords appear in your site as part of the content or a link. Then, they count the number of times the keywords appear in your site, before eventually analyzing how the keywords were used. Depending on these, they will rank your site’s relevance and position in the list.

Use links

Aside from the presence of the keyword in the content, searches also recognize connections through links. The number of reputable sites that link to your site as well as the number of links that you have for each and every one of these sites also plays a role in determining your search engine ranking. Essentially, the more links going in and out of your website, the better your position in the list of results.

How exactly do you establish a network of links? What are the popular backlink building strategies?

You can visit other sites, preferably those with the same relevant content, to exchange information and contacts. You can also join forums and discussions. You can even post comments and drop links this way also. But be careful with this because dropping links too aggressively this way can be penalized by online ranking engines, thus creating a negative impact on your position in the list.

There are directories to which you can submit links also. This is a common and fairly popular strategy. But the most convenient way to go about this would still be to hire a link building agency. This way, you won’t risk penalties or waste a lot of effort targeting sites that won’t do anything to raise your ranking.

An SEO company may also offer a guest blogging service to help you get high-quality links from websites that have high domain authority. This guest post service usually involves everything from content creation to blogger outreach.

However, if you are still willing to risk a few points, and go through the tedious task of submitting links to build links, then link away.

Put descriptions in your HTML

When search engines conduct queries or searches, they send out crawlers through the web. These search engine crawlers look at more than just content. On the contrary, the machine language and architecture is what they often see first. Fortunately, this can be exploited also. However, you need to have knowledge of HTML, and this, regrettably, is not for everyone.

For those who do though, you can edit titles, descriptions, headers, and other elements in your website to make it more crawler friendly. It takes only a bit of effort, but it requires a specific skill set to accomplish.

Choose a good domain and a reliable hosting company

Another way to improve visibility is to choose a good catchy domain name with a dependable hosting company. While a good domain name does not guarantee a good rank from search engines, it may make it easier for visitors to pay you a repeat visit. You see, a good domain name should stick easily. This makes it convenient for people to remember your site, thereby leading to higher chances of coming back.

Also, when you are choosing a domain provider, make sure you’re getting a reliable hosting partner to go with it. Hosting services would determine how your site holds and operates. These hosts would be responsible for your site’s operation and integrity – from backing up contents to ensuring site security, and even loading times.

Let’s face it. If your site seems buggy, loads too slowly, or fails to load most of the time, your potential customers would not want to come back or make any purchases, to begin with. This directly affects your company’s reliability and security which are understandably big issues for a lot of people.

In other words, if you rely on your website for your business, then making sure it appears on most search engine results should be a major consideration for you. With more than 4 billion Google searches every day, there’s an abundant supply of potential customers waiting to be pointed in the right direction, if you only know what to do.

To capitalize on this opportunity, you can tweak your site in several ways on your own or you can also hire the services of reputable SEO companies to do the work for you. Whatever the case is, higher site traffic would mean more business for you.