Using Keywords To Increase Website Traffic

These days there is a lot of competition on the Internet to get your attention. So, how do you create a website that will get seen by your target audience with so many websites on the Internet targeting the same visitors that you want? One way to increase website traffic on your website vs. your competition is using keywords.

A keyword is nothing more that the word or phrase that people use when they search on the Internet. For example: let’s say you are new to an area and you are looking for a veterinarian to take your pet to. How to you find one? You can ask your neighbor if they have a pet, where they take them. Or you can go to your computer, open up an internet browser and type something like: “veterinarians in + whatever city you live in”.



When you ask a search engine for something specific like veterinarians in your area, they go out and find all the websites that fit those criteria. So now you may be asking yourself, how do I tell the search engines that I am a veterinarian in a specific area?

Well, one of the best ways to do that is using keywords in certain places on your website. Some of the places you will want to have keywords are:

• The page title
• Headlines and subheading
• In the meta description
• In the body copy
• Image alt tags (I’ll have to explain what this is in another article)

The important thing to remember when you are putting keywords into your website is to not go crazy with them. The key is to use your keyword phrases in strategic locations on your web pages but still have the content sound natural to your visitors. For more information on using keywords, you may be interested in reading "How to Write a Blog Post Using Keywords"

Creating a keyword list for your business is probably one of the most important things you can do for your website.

Here are my 3 top reasons to create a website using keywords:

• Search engines use keywords to direct visitors to the correct site based on what they ask to see when they put a word or set of words into the search bar.
• Visitors are more likely to stay on your website if they actually see the keywords on your website.
• If you decide to do any advertising online, your costs will go down while your conversions go up.

Using the right keywords on your website builds a strong foundation for everything else that you do to get traffic to your site.

What Keywords Will Help Increase Website Traffic?

Now the question is “what keywords do I use?” The short answer is to use the keywords that pertain to your business that get the most searches per month but have the least amount of competition. The best way to get this done is to use what is called “long-tail keywords”. Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that contain between two and five words. Let me try to explain that concept with an example.

I’m going to use “Gardening” as my keyword subject because it is something that I know very little about. Seriously, the only green plants that have a chance around me are made from plastic. So, let’s say that I am going to create a website for a small business whose main focus has to do with gardening. If you go to search Google for the word “gardening” (note that I put the word in quotes), you get 160 MILLION results. Every one of those results is the competition. Not Good!

Okay, if I build that website with only that keyword, my client may never get found and will never use my services again. With that as a result, I’m going to have to narrow things down a bit. The website’s main focus may be gardening, but what if we had a web page on “vegetable gardening”?

If you search “vegetable gardening”, you get just over 3.25 million results. That’s a much smaller number but still a huge amount of competition. Now let’s narrow it down even further. What if we create a web page on “vegetable gardening for beginners”? Now our competition is down to just under 700,000.

Do you see how using a long-tail keyword can get rid of a lot of competition? You will still have a website based on your main focus “gardening” but by using a more specific phrase you get rid of most of your Internet competition.

Remember to use keywords in your content so that your website is more easily found. That being said, don't go crazy using your keywords to the point where your content doesn't sound natural.