In this post, we are going to give you an overview on how to get more traffic to your website and increase your online branding. This is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) 101!

Whenever I meet with startup founders, the first question they ask is “how to get more traffic and increase their branding online?” and my reply without thinking is the following:

If you want to sell a product or provide a service to your customers, they will either search to find you or search to make a decision on you. It is critical to know:

• 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying (adweek.com)
• 77% of people read online reviews before buying (business.com)

In spite of what you’re providing, your audience will do their homework before clicking on the subscribe or purchase button. Hence, the position of your website has a direct correlation with the traffic. Google is the most visited search engine on the internet, and it tries its best to prevent scam and non-relevant results to show up for the visitors. 

Through this article, I will try to point out a few elements that can increase your ranking. 

Domain Reputation

The expiration date of your domain has an impact on your ranking. Yes, you might wonder why; but it shows that how long it has existed and if you are planning for a long stay. Try to extend your domain for at least another few years. 

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate

From earlier this year, Google has announced that it would provide a better ranking to websites with SSL certificate. Also, the website that is taking user’s personal information must have SSL or otherwise Chrome browser will alert the user that the site is not secured. 

Fast Hosting & Uptime

Google Crawlers prefer the websites with faster load time and higher Uptime. Depending on your hosting’s equipment, the site’s files can be delivered faster to your users. Try to pick a hosting with better bandwidth speed and up-to-date hardware. 

Sometimes, the service can be down due to regular maintenance or attacks on the servers, which can increase the downtime on your website, this also has a large impact on your website’s ranking. Try Pingdom, It will record your website’s downtime and alerts you as soon as your website goes down.

Optimized pages

Faster hosting can help a lot to reduce page load time, but smaller web pages can help much more. Try to optimize your images, CSS & HTML files. If possible try to have your home page having total size about (or less) 250kb. Click here to test your page load time with Pingdom’s tool for free.

Enable the Cache

If you are using CMS websites such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento, it would help a lot to enable Cache. Enabling cache will reduce requests going to your database and hosting’s CPU; as well as using fewer resources and benefiting from faster load time. For WordPress, W3 Total Cache and Super Cache are great choices.

Google Analytics

Once you did all the above, now it is important to keep a record of your visitors and daily traffic. Google has a free tool to collect valuable information from your visitors. Analytics by Google will help you to record everything and review data through fancy graphs which assist you to make better decisions. 

Google Webmasters

By webmaster tools, you can provide necessary information to Google’s crawlers and be notified about any urgent matters that can impact your website’s reputation. Sign up for Google Webmasters for free and submit your website for the crawl. This will speed up the process of showing up on google results and also knowing where you are standing on results for every search inquiry by users. 

Once you did the above steps, I’m sure your users can now find you easier on Google’s search results. Now that your website has passed the SEO 101. You can ask your questions in the comments section bellow here.