Getting your website near the top of Google’s search results is the most important thing you can do to increase traffic. Everybody knows that without good traffic, your website is useless. Google uses a number of complex algorithms to decide which sites appear where, and they will move you up the rankings for a number of different reasons, but they will also drop you down drastically if you do things that they consider cheating. In some extreme cases, they’ll blacklist you completely. Once they’ve penalized you, it’s very difficult to recover from, and it’ll harm your website traffic no end. Some things will get you dropped down a little, but some mistakes will put you right to the bottom of the pile. You won’t get told when or why it’s happened, so try to avoid these common errors.

Know The Rules

Google changes their algorithms on a regular basis, so something that might have been fine at one point could suddenly get you knocked right down the listing and you won’t have a clue what you’ve done wrong if you don’t understand the new rules. You need to check regularly to see if there are updates and then check your SEO to see if you comply. Sometimes the changes are only minor, but occasionally, they completely rethink the way that they do things. That means that something that might have worked in your favor one day might be damaging you the next.

Buying Links

Having lots of links to your site from other relevant sites is a big part of the criteria that decides your ranking. There are companies out there that will promise to get you plenty of links and increase your rank, for a small fee of course. Most of them will find you links from spammy websites that aren’t relevant. They will claim that Google will never be able to catch you out because they run the links through so many different sites. While you might get away with it for a while, you’re going to be caught out at some point when the algorithms change. The bottom line is that buying links is a breach of the rules and you aren’t going to get away with it forever.

Link Directories

Link directories can do wonders for your site, but only if you use them properly, which a lot of people don’t. If you join a directory that is relevant to your website, you will hopefully see an increase in traffic. But you need to be careful which one you join because Google will judge you based on all of the other sites on that directory. If you join one that is full of spammy links, you will be tarred with the same brush and you’ll all be collectively dropped. The only directories that you should be joining are ones that are reviewed by somebody and don’t just accept any links that are submitted. That way, you can ensure you are only surrounded by good quality links.

If you avoid these mistakes and keep up to date with the changing algorithms, you should see an increase in web traffic in no time.