For our clients who require a content management system for their websites, we highly recommend and fully support WordPress and Yoast SEO plugins.
The best way to get people and search engines (which means more people) to your website is by getting relevant inbound links. 
If you have some great new gimmick on your website this may be easy as everyone will be linking to you.
However, with a basic, solid web page the process may be much more difficult and slower. How do you get people to link to you?
Blogs can be great way to get visitors and develop a long term return. Blog posts tend to stick around for a long time. The trick here is to get people to blog about your website without forking over a bundle of your hard earned cash.
A great idea is to become a guest blogger. This would be where you write blog posts for other people’s blogs and include your link!
This puts you in the drivers seat for a couple of reasons. First you have control over exactly what is said. Secondly, if you do a good job you may have the opportunity to make regular blog posts. That will build an audience on the blogs for your writing and turn into more and higher quality traffic for your website.
The key to being a great guest blogger is to write short (3 to 6 or so paragraph) posts that are interesting, informative, humorous and relevant to the topic of the blog (and your website). Of course they should have a link to your website. Don’t over do the linking. Don’t make it sound like an advertisement or something you just cut and pasted from your website.
A few minutes to compose a couple of well thought out paragraphs could do wonders for your web traffic. Keep looking for guest blogging opportunities and never use the same post for more than one blog. One post could bring a lifetime of traffic.
This may well be your most effective way to developing quality web traffic and enhancing your the SEO for your website(s).
Contact us if you need help finding guest bloggers for your blog or if you want to write blog posts and become a guest blogger for others.
So, you put a lot of effort into creating a really great website only to find that no one can find it and Google doesn't rank your site very highly. You hear about a thing called “search engine optimization” and decide to give it a try. Before you go adding your keywords to every element of your pages and building links any way you can, take a step back and remind yourself of the old saying, “sometimes less is more”.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, has really taken off over the last ten years as more and more fledgling webmasters have created websites, only to find that no one comes to visit. As they search around for ways to get more visitors, most of them quickly find resources on how to optimize a web page for the search engines and go right to work sprinkling keywords everywhere and building links from any place they can get them.
This causes problems for a search engine because, lets face it, you are trying to manipulate the search results and they are trying to avoid being manipulated. After all, just because YOU think your site is a great resource on a topic doesn't mean that it is. Google has already adjusted for the webmaster that is over-optimizing their website, and its called the Google “sandbox”. The sandbox is a name that disgruntled webmasters have given to the situation where a new site that should rank well for a keyword is nowhere to be found in the rankings, only to suddenly appear one day several months down the road. What is this sandbox effect and what could cause it?
One theory is that the “sandbox” is actually more of a “trustbox”, meaning that Google looks at many attributes of your site to determine if you are attempting to manipulate the search rankings. The most obvious, and the twp traps that most beginning webmasters fall into is over-optimizing on-page content and building too many low quality links too fast.
It is believed that the newer your domain is, the less tolerance Google has for over-optimization of pages, or suspiciously fast link building. Once you trip the filter, you're placed in the holding cell (“sandbox”), because Google suspects you of trying to manipulate the results. The tolerance for over-optimization may vary based on the industry, so “spammy” industries such as pharmaceutical drugs are far more sensitive to over-optimization than most. That can cause some discouragement by many who are hoping to find fast success since those industries are already competitive enough that you NEED highly optimized content and lots of links to possibly compete for top rankings, but you can't do it too quickly or you will be sandboxed.
At a recent WebmasterWorld conference, Matt Cutts from Google stated that there really wasn’t a “sandbox”, but “the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.” This means that avoiding the sandbox is merely a matter of optimizing your site without tripping the filters in Google's algorithm.
Ask yourself these questions to avoid over-optimization penalties:
In summary, the current theory about Google's “sandbox” is that it is actually more like a holding cell where the Google “police” keep your website when it is suspected of possibly trying to manipulate the search results. As the domain ages, most sites eventually gain enough “trust” to escape the sandbox and immediately start ranking where they normally would. Remember that Google is not manually ranking every website – in the end it is simply a computer algorithm and those who are able to score well in Google's algorithm WITHOUT tripping any filters will achieve top rankings and profit the most.
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