Does SEO Really Increase Traffic From Search Engines?

If I learn SEO or hire a search engine optimization expert, will that really increase our website traffic?

An essential element necessary to increase your website’s traffic flow is making it search engine friendly. The art of search engine optimization—or SEO—has become one of the most useful and popular tools available to webmasters trying to funnel people to their urls. This hasn’t happened without reason. With the popularity of search engines growing every day, and people’s attention spans shrinking, it is vital to show up near the top of the listings if your site is going to be noticed. Nearly 90% of web surfers don’t look at listings outside the top 20, one more reason why it’s vital to get ranked highly.

If you don’t know if your site is search engine friendly—it probably isn’t—and it’s about time to check. Open up Google in a new window and search for your company name or website address. If it’s there click on the “Cached” link to see how Google sees your page. Brace yourself, this may be a painful experience if you’re fond of flash or lots of tagless images. This page is what the Google—or any major search engine’s—spider can see, and is also what it records in the index back at the Google ranch. Now if you ran a search and your page isn’t there at all, well, suffice to say it’s not very search engine friendly.

So now that you’ve assessed the situation, how does SEO remedy it? Primarily SEO will make the spiders that crawl pages and your site best friends. Consequently, your page and the major search engines start to recognize each other more fondly. If you still don’t think it’s important to show up high on the SERP think again - a number one spot for a competitive search term can be worth thousands of dollars in ad revenue alone.

A few ways that SEO can optimize your page are by looking at the keyword use in various areas of the site, the quality of the content, and the layout structure of the site. Few things will dissuade a spider from crawling your site more than pages that are buried behind piles of links or submission forms, so don’t underestimate the value of layout structure. Once the site is optimized it’s time to take in the fruits of your labor, within a couple of weeks you can expect a significant jump from your original position on the SERP.

The next installment in How Can I Increase My Web Traffic will discuss the importance of link building and the role of social media as well as internal link structure. Few things can increase trust and relevance to search engines like link building, so this will be something you don’t want to miss.