When you’re building traffic to your website, there really is never and ending point. Even if you’re ranked number one in search results for several of your most relevant keywords, there are always things you can monitor and continue to do to ensure your rankings increase and/or remain high.

Here is a traffic building list of basic principles to follow:

• Filling your site with valuable content is always a winner, and should be a top priority.
• Research keywords that are relevant to your niche, products, and/or services. Use the ones that are actively being searched based on your findings. Don’t guess!
• Use keywords efficiently by placing them within the page title, the first 25 words of your article, and about 3-5% throughout the article.
• Keep the site design and navigation simple so that visitors can easily find their way around, have a pleasant experience and feel confident in buying from you. This also helps in word of mouth referrals and getting reviews, etc.
• Submit your articles to social bookingmarkng sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. on a regular basis. Remember, it’s not just your main home page that gets ranked, it’s every page. Use a free tool like Social Marker to speed up the process of submitting to several at once.
• Keep an eye on the competition. Are your competitors out-ranking you? Monitor their site, articles, and seo tactics and find out what they are doing that you’re not.
• Use Analytics to your advantage. Google Analytics is a poerful tool that shows you an enormous amount of information about your website traffic like where they came from, how long they stayed, what page they were on when they left, and tons more.
• Give your visitors a reason to remember you. Have them sign up to a free newsletter, give away a free report, run contests, etc.
• Long gone are the days when your online presence was a static brochure. You need a dynamic presence and interaction with your customers through video, twitter, and other means.

Traffic building requires kewyord research so that you know which keywords are being searched the most in your niche and which ones you should target based on your site and your competition. Once you have those keywords, one of the most important places to use them than in the title of your pages and articles.

Not only will search engines use the titles of your site and pages as a major factor in ranking your site, but it is also what they use as a title for your listing in the search results.

If you have a multi-page site and not just a single one-page static website, then it’s important to remember that every page of your site needs to be optimized for search engines using the keyword phrases you’d like to rank for. Single pages show up in search results and not just your home page.

The most common mistake that businesses make when starting out online is placing their business name at the top of every page in their website and nothing else. You want to add the keyword phrase that you want to rank for in the title tag, the title of the article and at least one heading tag (<h1></h1>). This is how you visitors will find you through search engines. In fact, most won’t even care about your business name until after they read about your services anyway.

While it may seem natural to want your business name in the title of your site pages, it’s important to realize that in order to get organic search traffic (visitors who find you through searching a keyword relevant to your business), you need to take advantage of the title space by putting in keywords.

For example, let’s say you had a design firm in Seattle and the name of it was Eye Candy Design. After doing some research, you might find that there are a lot of local people searching with the phrase “Seattle web design”. So, in order to try and show up in rankings for that phrase, put “Seattle Web Design” in your titles. Get the idea? Go get ‘em!

The Bounce Rate of your website is the traffic statistic that can be very upsetting. Basically, it’s the measurement of how many people have arrived to your site, only to leave immediately, within seconds. In essence, they arrive and bounce off to another site or close the window. This is one of the statistics that you want to be low. In Google Analytics, for example, it shows you a percentage figure overall, but you can dig down and see the Bounce Rate of more detailed statistics that are explained in more details below.

One thing you can count on is that if you have a very high bounce rate, something is wrong with your site that needs attention. This could be one major thing or a series of small things combined that turn off the visitor at first glance quick enough that they do not even want to give your content a chance. It could be the content, the advertising, poor navigation, or several other things.

One thing to keep in mind is that not every Bounce means the same thing, and it’s important to dig deeper into your site analytics to help find the root of the problem.

The following are a couple of tips in how to get to the bottom of your Bounce Rate problem.

Explore single page bounce rates
Starting with your home page of your site, you can begin to dig down and check out the bounce rate for each page. Since not every visitor will be landing on your home page, you might have a few   ad things happening on single pages that are increasing your overall bounce rate. You also will want to check which keyword phrases visitors are searching to land on the pages. You might be ranking for keywords that are completely irrelevant to your site and therefor they realize quickly they hit the wrong place and Bounce.

Bounce rate for specific keywords
Since you’ll be checking out keywords anyway when you’re monitoring the pages, you might as well use your data to take a peek at what keywords have the highest bounce rate. You can view that separately in Google Analytics and can be very powerful information.