3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Get More Traffic
July 23, 2009 by Achinta "Archie" Mitra
Filed under Get Traffic, Search Engine Marketing
Getting traffic is the key to survival for every online business. There are many ways of attracting traffic to your site.
In this post, I will show you three simple things that you can do yourself to improve your search engine ranking to get more organic traffic. These are not difficult, they do require basic HTML skills but nothing that will need you to buy expensive software or spend weeks to learn.
1. Title Tags
The <title> tag is the single most important element on any webpage. Here’s an example of my title tag as it shows up in Google:
The reason a title tag is so important is because it tells the search engines what your page is all about. Make sure the content on the page is relevant to the title you have used.
Look at the source code of your HTML pages. Somewhere at the top, after the opening <head> tag, you’ll see the code for the <title> tag that looks like this:
<title>Enter Your Title Here</title>
That’s where you need to enter a keyword or phrase that describes your site or that page. Don’t just put your domain or company name unless it happens to be a keyword you are targeting.
If you are using WordPress, you won’t be able to directly edit the title of each page. Download the free plugin, All in One SEO plugin, it allows you to enter the title right on the page where you write your posts.
2. Use Header Tags (h1-h3)
Include your targeted keywords or phrases in your header tags. Use the h1 tag once at the top of the page, that’s your main headline containing your primary keyword(s) and then use h2 and h3 tags as subheads throughout the page. These can be variations of your primary keyword or phrase.
Header tags are useful not just for search engines. Site visitors tend to skip read Web pages. Using powerful headlines and subheads that are related to their search term will help to capture their attention and persuade them to read your copy.
Shown here is a screen shot of a post in WordPress:
3. Create a site map
This is another important element of search engine optimization. A site map helps search engine spiders navigate their way through your site and find inside or sub pages and categories. It is literally a roadmap of your entire site.
Also create an HTML version of the site map and add a link to it from the footer of your site. This is especially helpful for static HTML sites where some visitors may use this option to quickly navigate to a specific page or area within the site.
It is not difficult to create a site map in the correct format. Use a free service like XML-SiteMap.com to quickly generate a site map in XML format that is required by Google. Here’ a screen shot of the process:
Download the file and upload it into your public_html folder.
Next, create a free Google Webmaster account at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview and add your sitemap’s URL. You’ll now be able to monitor traffic statistics for your entire website.
You will want to update your sitemap each time you add new pages to your website, so that it is kept up to date and search engine spiders can re-visit your site to index the new pages.
This post is not meant to be a crash course in do-it-yourself search engine optimization. That would take much more than a few short blog posts. Use these three tips to tweak your site yourself and you’ll see a measurable increase in your traffic.
Many books have been written and you can find several courses that will teach you everything you need to know about traffic generation.
Of course, the one I recommend is my own “The Easy Guide to Unlimited Traffic.” 
WAIT! Before you go, take advantage of this FREE offer.
Thanks for posting about this, I would like to read more about this topic.
These are great tips!
You mentioned a WordPress plugin, and I just wanted to also had how easy all of these ideas can be implemented when using a self hosted WordPress blog. With how easy WP is, it really doesn’t take long at all to be able to set up a new site and start getting traffic to is very quickly.