30 one minute ways of optimising your website for more traffic and higher sales
Business people often ignore many simple fixes for websites. Their sites don’t get found or scare away visitors who do land there. Web developers often underestimate the plethora of ways to tweak a website for more visitors and higher sales. SEO has been around for 10 years but still many sites fail to take advantage of most little fixes Google needs to assess a site and visitors need to get what they want.
This list of 30 really “quick and clean”, mostly one minute fixes will enable you to give Google plenty of these so called “signals” it needs as well as the clues your visitors need to find what they want and ideally also to buy. I assume that your site has already some keyword research done, some basic on-page SEO measures implemented and some backlinks gathered.
Titles
- Add one more keyword to your title-tag if your site is already performing well in Google, substract one if your still a little weak in Google. Strong? Then follow this example: Before “SEO Blog”, after “SEM & SEO Blog”. Weak? The other way around.
- Add an often searched modifier to your title, something like “cheap”, “affordable” or “London”, “Glasgow” or “shop”, “services”.
- Remove your company name or shorten and move it to the end of the title. Wrong: John Doe Industries SEO Services Glasgow. Right: SEO Services Glasgow – J.Doe
Meta Tags
- Repeat the keyword/keyphrase at the beginning of the meta description: If the title is “SEO Blog” then the meta description should be: SEO blog: The UK’s leading SEO blog offering global search marketing news about SEM, PPC and more.
- Remove al other meta tags, they just clutter your code and make your “code to content ratio” look bad. Google ignores most, others are nice to have, not more.
Headlines
- Add a h2 headline which is a sentence explaining your h1 headline. Example: h1 – “SEO Services Glasgow”, h2 – “We’re the first professional search engine optimisation company in Glasgow offering SEO services since 1995″.
- Add a h3 headline with a teaser, something that kicks ass, example: “Seoptmise – The SEO blog that will kick your ass like Beckham”. It can be a longer one. Do not repeat keywords too often.
Page Elements
- Change your menu item “shop” or “services” to something that reflects what you offer or sell, e.g “SEO services”.
- Change your homepage link from “home” to “SEO Blog” or whatever your site or blog is about.
- Add your address in the footer.
- Create a big bold link or button with a “call to action” like “buy now!”, “subscribe here!” or “join now!”.
- Add a large phone number in bold at the top of your page
- Delete an element on your homepage you never click on other websites
- Change the anchor text of a “more” link to the keyword the “more” page deals with
Backlinks and PageRank
- SMS your mother/daughter/sister or father/son/brother and ask for a link to your site.
- Link out to your favourite site on a topic similar to yours. Recommend it explicitly.
- Add a sentence like this “Like us? Link us! <a href=”http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/”>SEO blog UK by SEOptimise</a>”
- Add a “permalink” link to your pages
- Add the nofollow attribute to your “contact page” link.
- Add a “Bookmark to Delicious” badge or button, Delicious bookmarks often automatically appear on blogs
Copywriting
- Mention what you offer exactly on your site/page, use brands and exact product names
- Mention where you offer it “SEO Services Manchester”
- Mention why you offer it “We offer recycling solutions because we believe that clean business is profitable business”
- Mention to whom you offer it: “Web hosting solutions for small business”
- Make an unordered list which reflects the 3 most relevant topics of the page you’re tweaking and put it on top adding the words “this article deals with…”
- Explain one key term the page e.g your homepage contains: SEO (Definition: search engine optimisation, the process of making websites more search and search user friendly)
- Add 5 tags to your page by adding following text: “Tags: tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5″. In our case it would be probably: “Tags: SEO, optimisation, website, traffic, sales”
- Replace your homepage images with smaller ones in byte size (below 50 kb) so that non-broadband users stick with you
- Convince! Start the first or second sentence of your page with “We will make you number 1 in…” instead of solely describing “X offers…”
- Add your name to the text: John, CEO of John Doe Industries. People trust people not companies.
This “quick and clean” fixes will help already tremendously. Many sites miss these opportunities. Do you want to spend more time than half an hour fixing your website to get more traffic and higher sales? Well check out this huge list of 5 minutes website improvements.
August 7th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Or; don’t do anything as your site may look too optimized afterwards.
I think it depends entirely on the site and market as to what “tweaks” to implement. Adding words to a title can do more harm than good in many cases. Changing up menu text can also do more harm than good. Anything you do can do more harm than good.
I’m simply posting to let anyone reading know that yes, changes can be good, but they can also be bad. No list of stuff fits in a box nicely. Proceed with caution. Changes made by a site owner reading this list who doesn’t understand things real well could be disastrous.
August 8th, 2008 at 5:49 am
Thanks for the 1 min. tips. Its a nice refresher and easy to read.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Hey Doug,
thanks for the feedback and the warning. I don’t think any of these changes may end up being “disastrous”, not even the two you cite as examples. They (the two) can be detrimental but as this article is for intermediate users they will not shy away from some trial an error I guess.
Of course you should not add 5 terms to title etc. but one at a time.
Thanks Rich, your website is down or your URL broken.
August 8th, 2008 at 11:10 am
“Repeat the keyword/keyphrase at the beginning of the meat description” – wait a moment, just need to pop out to get some beef….
:)
August 8th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Damn Peter! Now I had to correct it. #31: “Add a funny typo”.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Nice post, very specific and to the point.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
IMO it seems that no matter how optimized your page is for searching, you will only keep traffic by having good content. Word of mouth seems to always be much better than any SEO tricks.
By Word of Mouth I meen (delicious, digg, stumble upon, other more popular blogs/sites in the category mentioning an article from your site, or emailing an article or page to a friend).
August 8th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
The tips listed under titles are very effective, I’ve used them many times in the past.
Great post!
August 9th, 2008 at 7:51 am
Great list! Can somebody please explain these two actions and why you should do it? :
Add a “permalink” link to your pages
Add the nofollow attribute to your “contact page” link.
August 9th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Great tips. Putting the company name at the end of the title has been working very well for me.
August 10th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
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August 10th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Great post. There are many easy yet efficient ways to drive traffic. You’ve covered a ton of them. Great job.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Hey Edwin,
a “Permalink” helps bloggers and other publishers to link to you. They don’t have to search for your URL or copy it from the address bar. This way you ensure that you get credited as a source in a publishing environment where every second counts.
Usually your contact page is linked from all of your pages so Google will assume that it’s the most important page on your site instead of the more content based articles or pages. Normally a user coming from Google searches for an article, product or service not your email address.
August 11th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Perfectly done. You got my Sphinn for that.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Great post very useful – thanks for the top tips
August 14th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Easy ways to optimize any site for better productivity. Great post.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:08 am
great tips on optimizing website for more traffic. thanks.
September 26th, 2008 at 9:12 am
[...] Explain your headline with your subheadings. “Add a h2 headline which is a sentence explaining your h1 headline. Example: h1 – ‘SEO Services Glasgow’, h2 – ‘We’re the first professional search engine optimisation company in Glasgow offering SEO services since 1995′.” [SEOptimise] [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
[...] 22. 30 one minute ways of optimizing your website for more traffic and higher sales [...]
December 15th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
[...] Explain your headline with your subheadings. “Add a h2 headline which is a sentence explaining your h1 headline. Example: h1 – ‘SEO Services Glasgow’, h2 – ‘We’re the first professional search engine optimisation company in Glasgow offering SEO services since 1995′.” [SEOptimise] [...]
December 23rd, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Great advice I need all the help I can get ! If anyone wants to swap links get in touch through my website
January 3rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
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January 9th, 2009 at 10:26 am
can we add the keyword in image link? if yes then how?
please tell me.
well thanks for these nice tips.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Great tips, Should all help to improve search engine rankings. Thanks
February 4th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
[...] 30 One minute ways of optimising your Blog – 30 Quick and clean fixes for increasing traffic and further optimising your Blog. [...]
March 2nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Of the 30 tips above which ones would you say are missing from these metatags.
Search Engine Marketing & Optimisation (SEO) Agency | Improve online sales
Jim Stiner
March 26th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Is it bad to use the H2 elements for anything else other than a blurb about the article?
March 31st, 2009 at 5:41 am
Excellent, I’m surprised that there are a lot I was totally unaware of. Good compilation.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Hi. I was searching for website traffic related blogs. Read some of your blog posts and wish to tell you that your blog is very informative. Thanks.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Interesting post, just signed up to your RSS feed, hope to find some more great content here :)
August 14th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I just started a blog to promote my podcast. Thanks for the great tips on building traffic.
January 30th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Hi, Thanks for your great tips at DIY SEO.
It costs a fortune to get it done by experts so all of these tips are a great help
June 1st, 2010 at 8:00 pm
Hi, great article. I usually make use of feeder sites for great totally free traffic
Feeder sites are remarkable at generating substantial volumes of organic targeted traffic, fresh from the search engines in record time. What’s even better, you can literally rank for many of the most competitive keywords and phrases just by taking advantage of these traffic magnets.
In case you are not familiar with what exactly feeder websites really are, think Squidoo.com, Wetpaint.com, Tumblr.com and even Ning.com
June 8th, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Super Post, der Blog ist wirklich auch sehr informativ. Werde in Zukunft wieder mal vorbeischaun.
July 26th, 2010 at 6:18 am
Great list. I will be adding soon in my worlds best information site whereas already stumbled at my account :)