Bad Design

Having a good search engine ranking is not enough to retain the interest of your traffic if your website is designed badly. One look to see how clumsily it has been put together will only serve to make your visitor click right back out of your site again. A well designed website will win over visitors every time.

Spamming the Search Engines

The chances of getting your site blacklisted from the major search engines by creating numerous cloaked or doorway pages that contain hidden text to gain high ranking success is pretty high. The same goes for images that have irrelevant words embedded in them to fool the search engines. Most big search engines frown on these kinds of unethical activities and perceive them as a form of Cloaking or consider them as Spam.

Also, take care when choosing keywords for your website, make sure that they all relate to your theme. If they don’t, you run the risk of being penalized for spamming by the search engines. If you include irrelevant keywords, you may attract traffic for the short term, but eventually your website will be rejected from the main search engines.

Solo Keywords

Don’t be misled into believing solo keywords will attract lots of web traffic. This only works if your product is in an extremely niche market where a single word can only be acknowledged with your product with little competition. Multiple word keyword phrases or long tailed keywords are the key to traffic success.

Disorganized Meta Tags

Meta tags are pieces of code within your website that include information about every page. It's advisable to spend some time putting your Meta tags in order - search engines read these to know what your site's about, and they also work as a basic marketing tool to draw visitors to your site. Don’t replicate keywords more than 3-7 times in your Meta description as some search engines will consider it as spamming.

The Meta tag should include several keywords and structured in a coherent sentence. To accomplish the best possible rankings, you should put the keywords at the start of your description and close to one another. Making sure that they are spelt correctly and are relevant to your content will get you off to a good start.

Link Relevance

Many people think that links are not needed – wrong – they are very important and are extremely essential to traffic building success. The majority of search engines will rank your web page according to its popularity with other websites. More and more search engines are using link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Google uses it as its most important reason for ranking sites.

Developing good quality links will greatly benefit your website, these days, search engines are using a lot more refined ways to determine how popular sites are. Apart from the fact that the search engines will rank you higher in the listings, the links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you. In due course, every major search engine will use link popularity, so developing and maintaining it will be critical to your search engine position.

Un Targeted Traffic

To avoid attracting un-targeted traffic to your website, ensure that the Meta description tag contains a clear explanation of your website and what it is all about, including your keywords. Search engines need this information to show on listings and it will be how prospects locate your website. Without a Meta description tag, a number of search engines will only display the first few words on the page as your listing description. This will hardly persuade visitors to visit your site.

Your title is another important factor that is often overlooked by many. If your web page has no title tag, some search engine results will display "No Title" in the first line of your listing - resulting in inadequate traffic.

Keeping your Website Sticky

The definition of a “sticky” website is a site where visitors spend a lot of time. Of course, all websites will try their best to hold on to visitors, but some manage better than others. Some websites are naturally sticky due to their popularity such as: music, video and social networking sites like My Space, You Tube etc.

To make your website sticky and maintain that stickiness, you should update your content on a regular basis with good quality content. Keeping it fresh and current will result in your visitors returning again and again.