In the early days of the Internet, people participated in traffic exchange programs. You joined a network of websites that opened pop-under windows that contained a link to your website. Your website would get thousands of visitors within a few days.

Unfortunately, none of these 'visitors' would buy something on your website. Although these traffic exchange programs still exist, most website owners have understood  that these programs were pointless. However, a lot of business owners still try to get high rankings for the wrong keywords.

If your website has high rankings for the wrong keywords, you won't get targeted traffic. It does not make sense to get high rankings for a keyword that seems to be related but does not deliver people who are interested to buy.

For example, "car" is an extremely popular keyword. If you manage to get high rankings for the search term "car" then your website will get thousands of visitors per day. Of course, you will also have to invest months into getting your website on the first result page for that single term.

However, you won't get many sales from people who find your website through that keyword. People who search for "car" might be interested in anything that is related to cars: general information, car tuning, car repair parts, tires, news, images, etc. If you are selling products for auto cockpit cleaning on your website then most of these visitors won't buy.

It is important that you concentrate on targeted keywords that deliver targeted traffic (for example "auto cockpit cleaning", "car dashboard cleaning", etc.). It is much easier to get high rankings for these keywords, and you will get many more sales from these high rankings.

As said above, search engine optimization is not about getting high rankings. It is about getting targeted traffic. Getting your website on the first search engine results page (SERP) is the first step. Then you have to convince people that they click your listing:

• Use compelling website titles: The title is the first thing that searchers see because it is the big clickable part of the listing on the search results page. It should get the attention of the searcher. Ideally, the title contains an incentive to click.
• Try to optimize the description of your web page: Google and other search engines often do not use the meta description of web pages (especially if they think that they can provide a better description). Nevertheless, a good meta description can help you to get more clicks if search engines decide to show the description.

  Include a compelling reason to click your search result. Show benefits, value, solutions to problems, etc.

• Use meaningful URLs: a clear URL that indicates that the searchers are getting the desired content on your page is much better than a complicated URL with many parameters. If the URL contains words that are related to the search, the searchers will get a confirmation that your web page is relevant.

Further information about how to find the best keywords and how to optimize the conversion rate of your web pages can be found in our free search engine optimization manual. You'll also learn how to improve other elements of your website so that your pages get higher rankings on Google and other search engines.

"Improving content is always a great thing to do for a site, but don’t expect it to be a quick fix where rankings will increase overnight.  It seems more of a long term game plan for improving rankings. And you could see pages that Google already crawls more frequently see improvements faster than ones that Googlebot rarely visits."

"John Mueller of Google said on a Google webmaster hangout [...] that Google uses the same algorithm to rank the first page results that it does for the other pages in their search results. He said the top ten results are ranked using the exact same algorithm as results 11 through 100.

John said 'it's the same algorithm,' when asked about if the algorithm is different between the top ten and the other results."

"I will go with whatever you like [301 or 302 redirect]. And another point on that is that if we were looking for always – or respecting always – status codes, the http status codes, we would be in big trouble.

Sites screw them up all the time. So we have to have wiggle space to make sure we don’t ultimately hurt our users by not showing the right results.  But again, test it and we will try and fix it if we aren’t right."

"Google has been busy, that’s for sure. Since the August 19 update, we’ve seen a number of significant updates causing serious volatility in the SERPs. [...]

We know that change is constant in Google Land. So your best bet is to stay ahead of the curve by continually auditing your site, surfacing potential quality problems, and then rectifying those problems quickly. That’s how you can steer clear of the hornets’ nest."

Editor's note: you can do a website audit with the website audit tool.