A huge amount of our lives and daily activities now take place online, and the Internet has now become the most important platform for businesses, personal blogs, and portfolios. Over the last decade, the importance of creating a great website has become more and more apparent as every industry has become incredibly competitive online. In addition to creating an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly website design, you need to take all the necessary steps to maximize the traffic which visits your website.

The most effective way to increase your traffic is through SEO (search engine optimization). The best SEO experts implement a range of methods so that websites rank as highly as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs). This can guarantee a high frequency of visitors to the site, which can then become new customers, loyal readers, or whatever the website is seeking.

To help everyone maximize the potential of their website, here are six SEO strategy planning tips from the experts.

1. Address any Technical Issues with your Website

The first expert tip for effective SEO strategy planning is fixing any technical problems on your website. Technical issues reflect negatively on websites with both visitors to the site and the algorithms behind the crawlers which judge where competing websites are ranked on the SERPs. The times are long gone when website users are willing to expect anything other than a perfect on-site experience, so if your site has any broken links, slow page loading times, or difficult-to-navigate menus, they will quickly disregard your site and move onto your competitors’. Likewise, the search engine crawlers are highly sophisticated and will identify every technical problem and your website is highly likely to be penalized in your rankings. Put yourself in the place of your visitors and if you find anything frustrating about your website, resolve the problem immediately.

2. Produce Quality Website Content

Once you have taken care of the technical SEO, you then need to give your attention to the most important aspect of any website; the content. The folks at SEOJet know that content is king, and they explain that you need to provide relevant, quality content which is going to attract new visitors and keep them coming back. With so much competition for every website regardless of the niche, you need to stand out when it comes to your content. Users don’t want to read large blocks of text.

Optimized content uses the right headings, paragraph lengths, and provides visitors with an engaging experience. One of the best ways to create winning content is to research the most successful competitors in your niche. See what they are doing well, borrow what you can, and improve on their content wherever possible.

3. Research the Highest Ranking Keywords

Search engines are the most popular way for web users to locate the websites they need. When search engine users enter a search term, the first page of results gets 90% of all clicks, and the click rate below even the top five ranked results drops off dramatically. In order to ensure that your website is in that top five, you need to research the most commonly searched keywords and integrate them into the content on your website.

This needs to be done with some skill because if you don’t do it properly if you use too many keywords, for example, your website can be flagged up by the search engine crawlers for keyword loading, and your SERP rankings will suffer accordingly. Unless you know exactly what you are doing, it is usually worth hiring an SEO expert to write your on-site content to ensure it is perfectly optimized for maximum rankings potential.

4. Create Quality Backlinks for Your Website

The first three tips in this guide address your website’s on-site SEO, but this is only half the battle. The top-ranking websites have fantastic off-site SEO and this begins with backlinks. In order to create quality backlinks, you will need to contact authority sites which the search engine crawlers already rank highly in your field.

Search engines are very strict when it comes to backlinks and if you just pay for a load of links on any old site, your website is likely to be flagged and could even end up being blacklisted altogether. This can totally destroy your website and can be next to impossible to come back from. Building backlinks yourself can be very difficult so it is often worth hiring a specialized link building company to help you.

5. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Social media is fantastic for SEO purposes for increasing your website’s traffic, promoting your brand, and building your customer base. You can also promote new website content on your social media because far more people check their social media every day than their favorite websites. In order to use social media to your advantage, you will first need to research which platforms your visitors and audience use the most. From there, you have to provide innovative daily content because the attention span of today’s social media users can be very short indeed.

6. Be Patient about the Results

The final tip is to give your SEO strategy time to reap its results. Far too many people are impatient and change track or abandon their plan altogether because they don’t see overnight results. If you follow the five above tips, you will start to see results but you need to give them time to take effect. With SEO, as with so many other things in life, good things come to those who wait.

A well-devised and executed SEO strategy can really take your website to another level. Driving more visitors to your website will maximize your chances of achieving your website goals, whether that is to increase your audience or sell more online products. SEO is an intricate and highly skilled process and requires the right knowledge, experience, and analysis. SEO takes a while to show its results so don’t give up if you don’t see results straight away. Follow these SEO strategy tips and you will be on the right track to more traffic.