If you have a website and are trying to earn a living from it, then you need to know Search Engine Optimization. SEO is key to driving more visitors to your site. More visitors means more business, so you definitely need to read on.
As with anything, you can take it to the limit and hire an expert in the field, but there are things that you and your web designer should be doing to optimize your search engine rankings. Here is a list of 20 things you can do now, to increase traffic to your website.
- Use a keyword tool such as Google Adwords Keyword tool or their Search Based Keyword Tool. You will then be provided with other key words and phrases that users search for that you can then integrate into your site. Take care, however, not to stuff your text with keywords in an unnatural way, which can count against you.
Content dominates. Web crawlers love ever-changing content, so update your site regularly. Post good, well-written material that is unique and be sure to include your keywords within the content. Consider a blog, if your site content won’t change frequently. Spiders LOVE blogs!- Content may dominate, but links rule. Make sure to get your site listed in numerous trade directories, associations, colleagues, etc. Be sure the locations of your backlinks are quality ones, and relevant to your site.
- If you like image maps or Java script drop-down menus, be sure to include text links in another location on your pages. Web crawlers can’t decipher your images and they require real text to follow.
- Page titles are important! Title each page individually according to its subject matter. Title tags should be keyword focused, and if you insist on putting your business name in it, put it at the end.
- Write articles. As usual, be sure to include your keywords, post them to your site, and then post them to article sites (GoArticles.com is a great one!). You will be amazed at where your articles will end up after a few months, all linking back to YOU! UPDATE**** Evidently Google is starting to penalize for duplicate content on the web, so be careful about where you post your articles. Google likes original content, so if you post your articles in numerous places, try to change it up a bit, so you’re not penalized.
- Hyperlinks within your site should be written with the proper keywords, i.e. “green t-shirts” and not “click here”.
- Go easy on the Flash. Spiders cannot crawl flash animations, so keep them to a minimum, especially if the animation contains text that you want your visitors to read. Integrate that text into the page instead.
- Make sure that external links to your site link to the actual domain, i.e. http://www.redroses.com, and not http://www.redroses.com/index.html.
- Renew your domain name promptly! Domains that are about to expire, or even less than one year remaining can be considered spammers by some search engines, and this will hurt your rankings.
- SEO is not a one-shot deal. Since searches, and searcher’s needs, change quickly and frequently, expect to work on your optimization daily, in order to get the best results. Getting crawled initially can take weeds, and getting high rankings can take months, sometimes a year or longer, depending on how much effort you put into in. Nothing ventured, absolutely nothing gained, in this case.
- Use captions with your images. No brainer, and use ALT tags with them as well. Include the words “picture” or “image” in your ALT tags, as searches will often be for a keyword along with one of those words.
- Use an XML sitemap. You can get one of these from Google as well. Sitemaps provide very crawl-worthy text for hungry little web spiders.
- Search engines love video, too! Be sure to include video in your sites, and then upload the video to other quality sites, such as Metacafe, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and of course YouTube.
- Get a Google Webmaster account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools. This will provide you with numerous tools that you can use to better enhance your visibility.
- List your site initially with directories and search engines. Here are a couple to get you started:
- Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/
- Google Local Search – http://<cite>www.google.com/local/add/</cite>
- Open Directory Project – http://www.dmoz.com/
- Yahoo Directory – http://dir.yahoo.com/
- Yahoo Local – http://local.yahoo.com/
- Monitor your account. It’s vital to know what page your visitors are coming in to your site on, and what page they’re exiting from.
- Link back to yourself. Putting links to other pages in your site is an easy way to increase traffic to individual pages.
- Name your URLs clearly. It’s easy to understand what www.cowboyboots.com/women/buckarooboots.html would contain, but if your page is titled www.cowboyboots.com/45773/bbb.html search engines are much less likely to figure that one out.
- Don’t make the mistake of paying money to companies that say they can get you ranked higher! With a little time and effort, you can improve your site’s rankings yourself, and some search engines consider links from these sites to be of poor quality. In fact, links from link farms, can count against you.
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Lately I have been doing a lot of directory submissions to build up my backlinks. I write an article and then submit it to the following sites for approval: 1. Ezinearticles.com (constanly crawled by google) 2. Goarticles.com (huge site, lots of traffic) 3. Rysite.com (tweets articles + quick indexing) 4. Articlealley.com (easy to submit to) 5. buzzle.com (has a high PR and is very popular) By submitting articles to those sites, i have recieved a lot of traffic. Especially from rysite.com because i get traffic not only from my article, but they tweet it to a following based on your keyword and as a result I get traffic from twitter as well. Hope that helps!
Great tips Foster, I think I’ll check them out myself! Thanks!
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Glad you like it. I started in September of ’09.
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Thank you so much! I really liked your video as well because it looks so professional. I also like how we have a similar style in editing. Haha!
Hi and thanks. I am definitely focused on articles or blog posts and information on web-site search engine optimization. You never know where you may discover a brand new approach (well, new to me at least). Although there are always fundamental Search engine optimization strategies, just a little tweak here and there, and your site will get better search positions. If you work with WordPress getting the most suitable plugins along with a good premium theme will help your Seo. It’s also vital to keep up to date with the changes in search engine algorithms.All the best
Here, here, there’s always something to be learned from everyone!!
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Yes, http://www.twitter.com/theresasheridan. Would love to see you there!
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Thanks for saying so, I’m glad you enjoyed it!