With a website you need traffic to make money, if you have enough traffic advertisers will hunt you down, blogs will be referring to you and pleading for links and the bucks will start to roll – it is just a matter of getting the maximum income you can from the pretty much unlimited space on your site.
There are many ways to getting traffic however not many are better or more sustainable than getting top rankings for popular keywords on the top search engines like Google and Yahoo. I have seen major companies that are paying money to systems like Google Adwords to get visitors when with a few tweaks of their site they wouldn’t have to be paying money to anyone.
For me in the last month or two this has become a real focus, I have found out so many things that I was doing wrong on some of my sites that really seem stupid, here are some of the mistakes I was making…
Using the same title and keywords on EVERY page of my site.
Now this is because I use included headers on my sites, that means if I want to change a link at the top of the page, I only need to change it in one place. However my title and keywords are also in this header so I need to change this so that every page has its own relevant title and keywords.
Optimized for unpopular Keywords
I used to guess at which keywords I optimized my sites for – now I use the Keyword checker tool to find out whether it is worth the effort.
Site Name in Title
On my job hunters websites I used to have “Jobhunters” as the first word in the title, now I have learnt that this is a waste of time, much better having something like Job Search as people will be looking for that – not Jobhunters. (obviously if you have a really big and well known brand this will not apply.)
Not using heading tags for headings.
On most of my sites I was not using tags like h1, h2 etc and was just increasing the font size. Google and other search engines look for heading tags to verify what is important on a page, so you need to use them.
Well that summarizes some of the main mistakes that I made with my sites, its still taking me a lot of time to fix them up but the results to date are promising. Good luck with your own sites and if you can think of a relevant mistake that you have made please let me know and we can include it in a future article. (along with the relevant link of course!)