In true Halloween spirit, we’d like to dedicate this week’s blog post to the top 5 SEO tricks to get the ultimate treat–more leads! Since most of you readers won’t necessarily be trick-or-treating (or maybe you will be, we won’t judge ), we hope these tricks will suffice.

1) Drive Qualified Traffic to your Site – Don’t scare visitors away with

Traffic to your website is great.  Qualified traffic is even better.  Qualified traffic means visitors to your site that are more likely to results in a sale, lead or other type of conversion. These visitors are usually further along in the sales cycle and know what they are looking for.  Best practices for driving qualified traffic are optimizing for long-tail keywords and also analyzing Google Analytics goal data to determine which keywords results in the highest number of conversions.

2) Utilize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

When a user performs a search for one of your keywords, the first thing they see on your listing are your page title and your meta description.  Page titles should be optimized with your highest priority keywords for that particular page, as page titles hold a great deal of SEO weight in the eyes of search engines.  Meta descriptions should include relevant information that will make a user want to click on your search listing, possibly including a call to action. Good meta descriptions can increase clickthrough rate from the search engine results page and result in driving more leads from organic search.

3) Make Conversion Elements Stand Out

Once customers arrive at your site, is the desired course of action obvious?  If you want a user to make a purchase or fill out a lead form, make sure that there is a call to action in an obvious location. Place these conversion elements (link, button, form, etc.) in a location that users can’t miss.  According to EyeTrack III’s Eyetracking study, users first look in the top left of a page and move right and down.  However, location is only one factor to consider.  Call to action, value proposition and color can also be very important factors in not only getting a user to notice a button, but decide to click it as well.

4) Add Fresh Content

Even if your site is a lead generation site or an e-commerce site that doesn’t seem like there’s a need for regularly added content, you should always be adding as much fresh content as possible.  In order to rank well for a given set of keywords, you must write about the topics relating to these keywords.  The more often content is added, the more likely search spiders will increase the frequency at which they crawl your site. Being crawled more often can help a page rank higher for its targeted set of keywords.

5) Write Compelling Content

In addition to regularly adding content to your site, it’s important to take the time to make sure your content is compelling.  Creating fresh content for search spiders to read is important, but you should also consider your users. For longer-tail searches, often times the snippet listed on the search engine results page will display content from within the site, highlighting the search terms and where they were found on the page.  If your content is interesting and informative, people will be more likely to visit your site, and more likely to come back in the future.  This should also increase your time on site, and bounce rate, as users will have a reason to stick around.

Again, we hope these 5 tips help your SEO efforts.  Have a great Halloween!

-Alex