Increasing traffic with a Traffic Builder

Yola Traffic Builder is the SEO tool built into the Yola Gold hosting package.

Traffic is the life-blood of any successful website. Whether you're just starting your business, have a thriving online store, or are building your online presence for the first time, the reason for building a website is the same: to attract visitors and interact with them in a meaningful way.

As you take your business online, we want to help you optimize your website and help you get found through search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Using a combination of reporting and proactive scanning, Traffic Builder will give you the tools to help you manage your search engine optimization (SEO) and take charge of your search engine strategy.

SEO is the name given to the various methods you can employ to improve your website's visibility online. This includes: adding keywords to your site, using Google Adwords, linking to other sites and leveraging social media. Take a look at our SEO: Promoting your site tutorial, which covers all of these topics.

Traffic Builder focuses on your site's search engine performance and covers ranking, keyword traffic and continual scans to ensure optimal performance.

What features does the Traffic Builder offer?

An easy-to-use site scan built directly into the Yola Sitebuilder. The scan quickly identifies errors, warnings, and optimizations. The generated report provides targeted advice for improving your site’s search engine ranking.
The site scan also includes a detailed breakdown of your current keyword usageallowing you to identify which keywords you use frequently and which ones are missing from your site. Included is advice as to where in your site important keywords are most effectively used. Our smart scoring system also warns when keywords are in danger of being overused.
A detailed keyword breakdown provides current traffic volume for each of your keywords, letting you know which terms are being the search for frequently and which ones are hardly used.
The Traffic Builder dashboard includes a continuous, automatic monitoring of your site's current search engine ranking for specific keywords relevant to your site. Rankings are tracked and displayed for the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Your month-to-month progress is tracked to show you how your ranking has changed.

Do I have to pay for advertising if I use Traffic Builder?

No. Traffic Builder focuses on organic search. When a user types in a keyword or phrase in the search box, they are presented with both paid and organic results. Organic search results are generally found beneath paid search results and are organized by relevance. Relevance is based on linkage data, trust-related data and page content.

Most internet users have a healthy suspicion of paid results because they are not top-ranked by “merit”.

Paid search results will often be overlooked in favor of the natural or organic search results as users feel that these results are a more accurate reflection of what they might want as they are generated by popularity and common usage.

Will Traffic Builder make my site number one?

No. While we'd love to guarantee search engine success it is not possible to do this. Search engines' algorithms are constantly changed, and this means that your SEO strategy is a constant work in progress. This means you need to take time to update your site regularly and ensure that your keywords are relevant.

Traffic Builder provides you with an easy way to manage your site's performance, by focusing on important aspects of SEO and giving you easy-to-understand feedback about how to resolve problems.

What does Traffic Builder actually do?

Traffic Builder is built into the Sitebuilder and allows you to scan your website in real time. The scan offers an insight into what aspects of your site are considered important by the search engines. You can run a scan and any problem areas are identified. Examples of this include broken links, lack of a custom domain, empty H1 tags.

You can rectify each error individually and run another scan. The site scan is user-initiated (i.e. it is not automated) and can be run at any time.

Traffic Builder's primary focus is on site content compliance and site keyword density.

Site content compliance

Page titles: Page titles are important as they help search engines understand what a page is primarily about. Selecting short but relevant page titles can help improve the search rank of your page.
- Traffic Builder highlights the pages that do not have titles.
- It will check whether the existing titles are under 66 characters.
Meta descriptions: A meta description is a short summary of the content of a webpage. It should accurately describe the content of a website and will be shown as part of the search results for some search engines.
- Traffic Builder scans the site to determine whether the description is compliant and fewer than 155 characters.
Page Name Special Character: This checks whether your page names include any special (difficult to read) special characters (such as %, !, @).

Page Headings: Scans your page headings to ensure they're SEO-compliant.

Content length: Search engines look at the amount of content on a page to determine if there is enough information to be considered useful to a visitor. In general, 300 characters or more is considered sufficient.
- Traffic Builder will checks whether the minimum amount of content on page is 300 characters.
Alt Tags for images: These tags are used to provide an image with descriptive text as the search engine spider cannot recognize the content of an image on a webpage. Having alt tags improves overall search rank as well as helping images get found in image searches.
- Traffic Builder scans for alt tags and highlights the images without tags.
Missing images: Search engines notice broken image links and penalize sites that contain them. Make sure all the images you reference exist. Edit the images in Sitebuilder to fix the error, or, if the image no longer exists, remove it from your site.

Site keyword density

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of SEO keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

Traffic Builder scans the following for keyword density:

Page title (this can be added/edited in the Page Properties area in SB)
Body content
Alt tags
Description tags
H1 tags: An H1 tag is an HTML tag used to symbolize the heading of a page or a section in a page. As search engines crawl websites, they rate the importance of content based on the HTML tags they are under. This is important for SEO as search engines pay special attention to these tags because they denote the importance of that text in a web page.
- Sites are scanned for H1 tags and pages without tags are highlighted.

How much does it cost?

Broken links: Search engines notice broken links and penalize sites that contain them, reducing the chances of getting the desired SEO results.
- Traffic Builder displays the number and names of broken links.
Load time: Search engines can penalize a website that takes too long to load. Things like large images or scripts might affect a website's overall load time.
- Traffic Builder scans for images larger than 1MB and highlights them.
- The total size of all images combined on each page will be displayed.
- The site is scanned for any flash that could potentially affect load time.

Traffic Builder is part of the Yola Gold hosting package. Take a look at our Pricing pagefor package pricing. You can purchase or upgrade your Yola account in My Yola. Hover over your email, click Account status. Click Upgrade and then select the package you would like to upgrade to.

Remember: Purchasing a domain with your Yola Gold subscription entitles you to two months' free subscription as well as one free year of domain privacy.