keyword optimization is one of the most important tools you need for your website. Keyword optimization or keyword research is the act of researching, analyzing and selecting the best word to your products, services or campaign in order to target and drive traffic from search engines such as Google to your website and your business.

Here are the tips on how to drive traffic to your website.

Choose the right keywords

The first step of reaching the top of search results is identifying the right keywords. It can either be a single word or entire phrases. The most searches on the internet are made in the form of a question. Therefore, before you start writing down the keywords, you need to decide which keywords you want to focus on. These are the words people would type into the search engines in order to find your website, blog, service, or product.

1. Start with customers

Think about who your target audience or customers are. What are they likely to type into the search bar when they are looking for answers where your services can help them? Why not ask existing customers what they would search for?

2. Know the competition

It is important for you to choose words that many of your target audience might be typing into search engines, they should not be words that bigger companies with a big budget will compete for.

3. Use Google tools

Google has several good tools which can aid you to find what is popular to search.

On Google Trends, a public web facility based on Google Search engine shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages including a list of popular searches.

You can also enter keywords and see how popular they are, compared with other phrases and ideas on similar terms – in order to choose the one that most are looking for.

You can also find keywords using Google’s “Keyword Planner”.

Customise Your Content

Once you have successfully chosen your keywords, there are a few other things you need to do in order get your site ranked high on search engines. One of such things is content creation. You have to create and distribute relevant and valuable content that attracts and engages your well-defined target audience. Content marketing helps us to attract new customers and build loyalty with existing customers.

1. Quality Text

Use keywords in the title and also, include the keywords in the body, the much higher up it is in the text, the better it is for your ranking.

However, be careful not to use your keywords too much. Google may interpret your site as a nonsense page which is only trying to attract traffic and you go down in search results. Your content should feel natural and interesting. Which of course is also important for your visitors.

2. Have Photos

Rename even your photos with your relevant keywords. This will make it possible for search engines index them and you can get hit even in image search. If you have the opportunity to enter an alternative text for each image, do not let go of such an opportunity.

Get Links from Others

The most important thing for search engines is to deliver good and relevant results, remember that’s their primary business. Therefore, priority is given to websites that Search engines deem others rate high or think is good. An example is sites with links and many visitors who stay long to engage with the site. Therefore, this is really important too:

1. Make sure to get a lot of visits to the page

Ask family and friends to visit your website. Get the link or URL out there as often as possible, for example, you make a video, put it up on YouTube and the links there – but incorporate all the content on your site and link to it there.

2. Ask others to link to your site

Ask business partners or customers to link to you, perhaps in exchange for a link back or share interesting tips in your field and let others get put up pieces of contents with a link to you.

3. Share your site on social media

Sharing your website and contents on social media is extremely important. It can provide visits to the website, more traffic, attention and higher rankings

4. Get visitors to share

Get others to share your site and contents on social media, using “share” buttons. AddThis is one of the free tools allows you to instantly share or bookmark pages with one easy-to-use tool.

Website Tips

1. Use Google Search Console

The Google Search Console (aka Google webmaster) is an amazing tool which offers many tools that will aid you to thoroughly analyze your site. From this analysis, you can work on problem areas to make your site rank better on Search engines especially Google

2. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly,

With a good percentage of the world’s population owning mobile devices these days, it makes sense to make sure that your site is mobile friendly. Mobile users also expect a good mobile experience when they visit a site.

3. Fast Load Pages

A site that takes a long time to load will rank lower on search engines. Google has indicated in the past that site and page speeds are one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages.

Page speed is also important to user experience, the slower your site/page speed the more likely you will have high bounce rate and lower average time on your site. Some of the great tools which can help you with your site speed are Google Pagespeed Insights and GTmetrix.

4. Use Google AdWords

Business regardless of size wants to be found on the first page of Google. Getting seen by customers at the exact time they are looking for your information, products, services, deals. That is intent marketing (marketing based on someone intending to find your products), and it’s profitable.

Many businesses use Google AdWords to create effective advertising campaigns to market their products and services, drive traffic to their website, and ultimately, increase sales.