Practical Steps to Improve Website Traffic and Ranking

Blogging is now a good home-based business for making money online. However, earning money is not a guarantee for most bloggers. In our last post, we started sharing with you some common mistakes about earning money via blogging. Source: Earning Money From Blogging. This time we will explain more clearly how to increase website traffic and also let you know some more practical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips to increase website ranking, thus ensuring you can earn enough money via blogging.

There are indeed some basic principles that need to be enforced for improving search engine ranking as well as website traffic. We have summarized 15 golden rules for better site ranking as below:

(1) Start up a website with valuable content, no matter you are promoting what products and/or services for earning money. Search engines like Google or Bing (Yahoo) do love valuable and rich content.

(2) Keep website design layout simple. Make sure your customers can smoothly navigate between different web pages, locate what they really need and then buy your products or services easily.

(3) Do research and make use of the suitable keywords/phrases so as to successfully attract your target customers.

(4) Place both primary and secondary keywords strategically within the initial 25 words in webpage content and then evenly spread them throughout the whole page.

(5) Apply your keywords in the correct fields inside HTML content, such as Title, Headers, META Description, META tags etc.

(6) Submit different web pages (i.e. eacb web page and not only the main index page) extensively to the most popular bookmarking sites, web directories or search engines. As it is quite a repetitive and boring process, you may consider to hire someone else to do so. However, do make sure this is only a manual submission. Search engines like Google or Bing (Yahoo) can find out if you engage any automated submission service that they do not like.

(7) Keep closely track of important changes in search engine algorithms (such as Google Penguin or Panda updates) and adjust your webpages accordingly. This is a critical step for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to help keeping your search engine ranking, in particular for the Google PageRank (PR).

(8) Use logs or reports from website hosting company to see exactly where your website traffic is coming from. Analyze location of your visitors, the keywords they used to find out your webpage, as well as their incoming traffic sources (whether through search engines or external links from other websites).

(9) Use popular online utilities or tools (such as Google Analytics) to help keeping track on how your site is actually performing.

(10) Ensure customers can explore your webpages easily and provide them ways to remember it by using newsletters, money-saving coupons, free reports etc.

(11) Monitor the top-ranked websites for your niche and learn from major competitors what they have been doing right in content, design, keywords, navigation panel etc.

(12) When selling products or services for making money online, use popular payment method (e.g.: PayPal) and easy shipment arrangement for enhancing customer’s buying experience for your home-based business.

(13) Demonstrate your expertise by writing professionally and then submitting them to related article directories so that you can be perceived as an expert in your industry field.

(14) Do not regard your webpages only as a static sales tool. Treat it as an ever-changing and dynamic brochure and location, just the same way as if you were running a real physical store.

(15) If not sure, ask SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals for help or hire them right away. Although it may seem a bit too costly, it is still better than investing your money in a website which has no visitor at all.

That is all for our golden rules to improve website traffic and site ranking. These practical SEO steps shall be useful for your site to at least get ranked in major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc). By doing so, you are more likely to be able to earn some good money from your home-based blogging business.