The lifeblood of a site is its traffic. To paraphrase – if no one is around to browse your content, is it really there? It really doesn’t matter how objectively good or bad what you’re putting out is if you aren’t reaching your target number of views. The quickest way to raise your traffic is to go for quantity.
If you cast a wide enough net, chances are you’ll be able to attract more visitors. The proverbial net, in this case, is search engines, the top generators of “random visitors”. Most of the time, any site will gather a bigger or smaller following.
In order to be present on those vaunted first pages, you’ll need to work on your SEO rating. As you would expect, the higher the rating, the higher on the list your pages will be. Getting a good SEO rating is somewhat of a process – it doesn’t come naturally, and you will have to invest both time and money. The amount of each is up to you, but we’ve found that the SEO Booster plugin offers a great ratio of both and will provide you with a perfect solution to get you where you need to go.
SEO Booster dashboard
Your first contact with the plugin and where you’ll spend most of the time is the dashboard. Here, you’ll get data regarding keywords, backlinks, links, etc. With the dashboard being a primarily informational tool, you’ll need to look to other sections of the plugin to set up all the needed parameters. You’ll be glad to know that all of these are quickly accessed from the dashboard.
Keywords
Most commonly, we associate web searches with keywords. These are the main parameters we use while searching for content, after all. Because of this, it’s essential to highlight the best keywords for your pages, ones that give them the best chance to get a higher rating. SEO Booster shines in this regard, giving you an insight into the most popular searched keywords from several engines.
Not only will you be able to see what’s trending, but you’ll also get to follow the path of how your visitors came by to your pages. Analyzing one and the other will give you a chance to form your keywords that coincide with what’s hot at the moment. Although your content doesn’t have to center around these keywords wholly, they shouldn’t be forcibly inserted just for the sake of it.
Now that you know what works, you’ll be inserting the keywords you chose into the <title> tag and append them automatically to specific posts/pages, or the entire site in one quick swoop. You’ll get also to use widgets. One will center on related keywords to other pages spanning the entire site, while another highlights keywords used to link to the page you’re currently on. If you want to, you can also use the AJAX powered keyword table to search for individual pages and discover new keywords.
Going through all those keywords will probably make you head spin, especially once your database is overflowing with data. Just like with giant excel tables, filtering through it all is key.
Most important will be the internal filtering, more specifically the exclusion of those results. Other then very specific situations, there is no need to keep extensive track on searches done by your visitors when they’re already on the site. Naturally, you’d want them to go through as many pages, but the first one is most beneficial to the traffic flow. Again, your primary concern is how a visitor got to the page in the first place and how you can improve on that, whether he’ll go through your whole site is secondary.
Linking
You know which keywords to use, but now you need to implement them through links into your content. With new posts and pages, it will come naturally, but you need to think about already published content also. Thankfully, SEO Booster will rid you of all the unnecessary hassle, allowing you to import all the links you want, even retroactively, in just a few clicks with its automatic linking feature.
This feature will not only rid you of countless hours of unnecessary work but will also serve as an instant SEO rating bump once the process is finished. Just imagine, every page on your site automatically saturated with keywords and links. Your SEO rating will spike immediately. Add to that the option for implementing both internal and external links, and your traffic will also increase significantly along with your rating (because of the aforementioned internal links). You’ll be creating a loop where visitors spend time browsing more and more of your content just because the links are there. You can see in the example below how it actually works.
If you’re not only dealing with content but also work with various products, have no fear, SEO Booster has you covered. Linking to internal and external product pages is just as easy as with regular links. The effect of this method is pretty much the same as with other types of links, intriguing your visitor to spend more time browsing your pages and in the case of products, even buy something.
Let’s say you already know the importance of SEO ratings, and you’ve already used some other SEO oriented plugin before. Of course, you wouldn’t want all your hard work going to waste and would look to use as much of it as possible. If the previous plugin you’ve used (or are still using) is Yoast SEO, then you’re in luck, as SEO Booster has an importing option for that specific plugin. Just like every other feature, with a simple and quick process, you’ll get to import keywords in no time. This feature may not mean a lot to those who haven’t spend much time with the Yoast SEO plugin, but anybody who has sunk their time and effort will be glad.
Backlinks
Not all traffic is good traffic. There is so much data on the web; it’s hard to sort out the good from the bad. Backlinks help with this, showing you which sites are linking to yours – SEO Booster monitors all referred visitors and the sites that brought them to you.
This is important because, unfortunately, referral strings can be fake, meaning a regular link could not exist at all. The silver lining is that, as we’ve mentioned, the plugin will follow the backlink to the originating URL making sure everything is as it should be. This process will be repeated several times before you get back some kind of result. If everything checks out, anchor text or a site image will be added to the list. In case the links are fake, they are removed from your dashboard.
In case the bad links and/or spam are constantly coming from a few sources, you’ll have the option to filter them out completely. All you’ll have to do for it to stop is insert the URL or domain, and you’re set – no more spam for you.
Lost traffic
While putting out more content at a steady pace is a great way to bring in new visitors, it also means that most of your content has an expiration date and will get lost in all the shuffle. Some of it is, naturally, time-sensitive (like sports results) and simply can’t be made relevant again after a certain amount of time has passed. Most content, however, can be brought back and made relevant again.
If a page has, at some point, attracted visitors, that means it has merit. Over time traffic has gone down, and you’re presented with two options – leave it be/archive it or attempt to revive it. As you would guess, the first option means less work from you, but maybe with just a few tweaks, you’ll be able to ignite it and make it relevant again. It can be as simple as adding a few choice keywords to get it featured more in search engine results.
With all automatic features at your disposal, a few minutes of your time could make a vast difference in extending the relevance of your pages, making them essentially timeless.
404 Errors
Everything so far has pretty much been centered around proactive actions you can do with the SEO Booster plugin to raise your rating. In theory, even if everything is working as it should, you can, but don’t have to, improve on the whole.
404 errors, however, bring with them practically mandatory actions that have to be taken if you hope to keep any goodwill you’ve gathered with your visitors.
SEO Booster will provide you with a two-pronged defense in these situations, giving you both a notification when a site returns a 404 error to a visitor and displays the reason why it happened in the first place. Everything is done in the background, so until you receive a notification, you won’t even know it’s working at all.
Generally, you’ll look to solve the issue immediately, and a timely notification will give you the chance to do just that. As a last resort, if the problem is too big to handle quickly, you’ll at least be able to redirect from the broken page as a temporary fix.
Log
A log is something every piece of software should have implemented into its core functions. Just a simple way of being able to follow your actions will be that much bigger the worse things get. While everything runs smoothly, most of us don’t concern themselves with such trivial records. When problems arise, however, you’ll be thanking the devs for putting it in.
If you’re ever in a situation when pages or even your whole site is crashing around you, you’ll be able to backtrack all the changes you’ve done that may have resulted in such a situation. Chances are you’ll find the wrinkle that caused it all. Even if you’re unlucky and have to get someone else to fix it all up, you’ll be able to give them a detailed insight into everything that’s been done, helping everyone included in pinpointing the problem.
Automatic tagging
SEO and, therefore, keywords have come to the forefront, as you may have noticed. Going a step further with available features and you get to the option that lets you convert keywords to tags. Everything is done automatically, and throughout the entire site, so you don’t have to track down every time you’ve used the targeted keyword. A feature like this is useful because creating tags out of them increases the rating of the keywords, making them even more prone to be found as results of various searches.
It’s a customizable feature, too, where you’ll have to set up the format of how your tags will be added to the pages (like length in the example above). Remember, tags are taken into account by search engines; using them means better scores for your pages.
Weekly email reports
As you would guess from the obvious naming, you’ll have the option to activate a weekly report system. Enabling this feature means that every week, you’re provided with a detailed summary of everything that happened the week before regarding errors, new keywords, and/or backlinks. It essentially removes the need to check all of these things separately yourself, giving you everything in one place at the same time.
Pro Feature
There are two highlighted pro features available with the premium versions of the plugin. These aren’t as essential as the core features, but they do provide you with valuable information you won’t get from other sources within the plugin.
Crawled content
The first of these lets you check the frequency of how often your pages are displayed as search results. It’s virtually impossible for all your pages to be equally represented. However, by keeping track of how they are featured, you can actively influence the results. Doing so will give you the option to try bumping up less frequent pages making your site more even leveled.
Page speed
Nobody has to tell you your site should be fast. That fact really is common knowledge. You, however, are aware that your site’s response time is taken into account by the search engines when they’re displaying results. Again, quite obviously, the faster your site is, the better its score. The Google PageSpeed Insights testing is the second pro feature of SEO Booster, and you’ll be using it for testing the site speed automatically in the background and then checking on it in the overview once it’s done. Not only will you know your score, but you will be given tips on how to improve it in the future.
Summary
If you’ve gotten this far, then by now, you’ll know there really isn’t much more to add. SEO Booster covers a whole plethora of features, all with the purpose of making your site more prominent on the results pages of search engines.
It’s hard to fathom how much data is floating around out there. You really do need all the help you can get for yours to separate itself from the crowd. A plugin like SEO Booster that checks all the boxes really presents itself as the perfect solution for sites both small and large.