Best Way to Drive Traffic to Your Website

When you set up your website for the purpose of Affiliate Marketing, you know you need traffic. Is there such a thing as the best way to drive traffic to your website? Bad news is there isn’t one best way. Good news is that ranking on Google is not a rocket science, you can achieve good ranking if you follow a system. Some key contents of this article are credits to Wealthy Affiliate.

10 Steps to Achieving Top Google Rankings

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Google is by far the most commonly used search engine, so this article discusses mainly Google ranking though the basic principles apply to Yahoo and Bing as well. Google actually provides a SEO starter guide and I encourage you to read through it or at least glance through the contents quickly. If you are not yet familiar with Google Webmaster tool and sitemap stuff, you should also learn more about that because it is going to affect your site ranking as well.

I would tell you that ultimately to rank well, you need a few things: great content which renders your website an authority on the chosen niche, continual enhancement of contents over time, and user engagement and satisfaction. These things can’t be rushed and probably take 2 to 3 months to see great results. So work hard on your website but be patient.

There are 10 steps, however, that I have used which achieve some immediate effect especially for your individual posts. I invite you to first refer to my other article on Keyword Research as keyword research is an important concept as you try to rank.

The 10 steps should be your check-list whenever you are writing your pages and posts but you don’t have to adhere to it strictly if it does not make sense. Remember the contents are tailored for your website visitors and should be natural and useful.

Step 1 & Step 2 Meta Title & Description

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When you search on Google, something like this will appear:

Here my keyword is “How to do keyword research for Affiliate Marketing” and you can see that I have effectively made sure that both the Meta Title and Meta Description have my keyword. There is a WordPress plugin All-in-One SEO which can do this very well, watch a video here on this plugin if you are not familiar.

A well written meta description also tells people exactly what your website or specific post is about.

Step 3 Headline in H1

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This step is simple. Most WordPress themes should have your title of Page or Post as H1 font size.

Step 4 Internal Links

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Google likes that your website has internal links, so do reference back to relevant pages or posts. I guess it proves that  you are building up a knowledge library and your website has rich contents which may be interrelated within a broad theme. My website is about affiliate marketing and this is a broad topic, thus various posts on the sub-topics.

Step 5 Images with Alt Tag

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When you insert images to your posts or pages, there is an option to insert description of the images into the alternate text field. Make use of this and populate this with your selected keyword.  Google searches and indexes images, so this is going to help you rank as well.

Step 6 External Links

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Similar to internal links, you are encouraged to have some external links. For example, in this post, I have pointed to where to find Google SEO starter guide. This is also great when you don’t feel necessary to repeat good contents which are found somewhere else and enriches your article as a comprehensive useful resource.

Step 7 Keyword in URL

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Referring to the image in Step 1 & 2 above, you also see that I have my keyword in the URL. If you have set up your WordPress Permalinks settings correctly, this URL should just follow your page or post title, so this step should be an ease.

Step 8 Embedded Video

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Where applicable, you can embed relevant videos and in fact images. This makes your website more interesting and visually exciting as well, and of course it helps you rank. Video is becoming a big thing and you can either have relevant videos found on YouTube or you can produce your own videos.

Here’s one on Google Search Console.

Step 9 Comment Engagement

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Always encourage your readers to leave you comments or questions. This tells Google you are providing useful contents and people are interested to know more and you are supplying additional assistance and information as well. The other benefit is that from the readers’ comments and feedback, it is a great way to evaluate and improve on your contents accordingly.

What that means is that if there are a number of questions raised of about the same nature which are not covered in your original page/post, you can take the chance to enhance on that particular area.

Step 10 East of Social Sharing

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Build your website such that it is easy for your readers and yourself to share posts across the common social media platforms. This will increase the exposure of your website and drive more traffic to your website, and definitely very important for you to rank well.

Do try out this check-list and if you are doing things right, it should be quite easy to rank for your keyword on the first 3 pages fairly quickly just by following these 10 steps, especially if the keyword is not too competitive. As you build up your website, the ranking will progressively improve.

Do me a favour by leaving comments for me or if you have any questions, I will be most delighted to help out the best I can. I have deliberately written up this post using the same 10-step check-list. What I can’t control is comments, so this is greatly appreciated.