SEO strategies can be overwhelming to keep track of if you’re unfamiliar with how they’re working. This article is packed with strategies to supercharge your content and drive website traffic with SEO terms. When approaching SEO, you have to consider not only how your target audience will read the site, but how a computer will interpret it too. It can be difficult to please both parties so we’ve compiled a list of things you can do to reach your goals.

Don’t Write Like a Bot

If you’re too focused on using the keywords for SEO purposes, your website can come across as inauthentic. Even people not trained in SEO terminology can spot this from a mile away. Instead of being too heavy on the SEO terms, weave them into the story you’re telling or the information you’re sharing. Don’t make them the main focus of the page.

“You don’t get bonus points for having the same keyword on your website more than any other site,” says Chris Bridges, CEO of VITAL. “Driving website traffic means increasing the time people stay on your page once they find it. If a quick skim screams “spam” because you’ve crammed so many SEO terms into the page that there’s no real content, they’re going to leave pretty quickly which can be discouraging to you and your staff when you see a high bounce rate after putting in so much hard work.”

Prevent Comment Spam

Comments can be a great way to allow people to interact with posts on your website, but if there are too many comments with links, they can actually drive content away. Turning off links for comments is one of the easiest ways to prevent this from happening to you.

“While it’s a great thing to have people link to your website and have links that direct people elsewhere embedded into your site, you want to make sure you’re in control of where they’re going,” says Karl Hughes, CEO of Draft.dev. “Spam comments with links can severely diminish the website traffic that you receive and put all of your hard work down the drain. There is usually an option to allow comments but not links and that’s probably your best option.”

Give Others a Reason to Link to Your Site

Writing about relevant and interesting topics in addition to your product or service is a great way to give others a reason to help drive website traffic. If you’re only posting promotional materials, there’s a much lower chance that others will be interested in sharing your content.

“Find those hot topics in your industry and create an article or blog about the topic,” says Ryan Rottman, Co-Founder and CEO of OSDB. “This can be a great way to encourage others to share or link to your site while also communicating your brand’s views on these topics in relation to your company mission and values.”

Use Internal AND External Links

Internal links are great for directing people to products or services that you talk about within your article, but did you know that external links can help as well? Linking to external websites helps you support your ideas and content with other sources and creates a richer SEO score that will help drive traffic to your website.

“Internal links help people find the information you want them to know about your product or even link them directly to the page to purchase it,” says Tony Chan, CEO and Co-Founder of CloudForecast. “External links are equally important because search engines use the quality of these external sites to determine the relevance and importance of your website.”

Keyword Focused Headings (and Subheadings)

While you don’t want to be overly repetitive with your SEO terminology, placing these terms in headings and subheadings can be a great way to increase your ranking within search engines. By prioritizing these as headings and subheadings, you’re also making it easier for SEO recognition AND your readers.

“Keywords are not only something that can help your website improve its rankings, but they can help readers decide to stay on your page,” says Brett Estep, COO of Insured Nomads. “Use your headings and subheadings to quickly let your readers know where they can find the information they’re looking for. You only have a few seconds to grab their attention and encourage them to read more – so do this strategically.”

Promote Content on Social Media

Promoting our website content to drive website traffic by sharing the links on our social media pages is a quick and relatively inexpensive way to get the word out. Not only are you promoting the content, but you also make it easy for others to share your post and links as well.

“Sometimes we get so wrapped up in finding the perfect SEO terms to use on our sites that we forget one of the easiest ways to increase our website traffic,” says Brandon Sunny, CEO of Royal Moon. “Sharing your own articles on social media not only boosts the number of potential impressions, but it also helps fuel your social media platform as well.”

Conclusion

Supercharging your content and driving website traffic with SEO strategies can be accomplished by carrying out a few changes in your approach to the content on your website. First, it’s important to have something worth sharing. People are more likely to stay on your website if the topic is interesting and the headings and subheadings grab their attention.

You’ll also want to make it sound organic. Don’t cram so many keywords into your page that it feels like spam. Speaking of spam: you can prevent SEO rankings from dropping by preventing spam links in your comments by turning off the ability to link within text in that section.

Finally, Using both internal and external links can help drive website traffic and encourage people to navigate to other parts of your website as well. It acts as a sort of ‘reference guide’ for the search engines too so they can see the relevance and importance of your content based on the links you provide within.

Hopefully, these tips and strategies can help supercharge your content and drive website traffic for your business.