Copyright
© Daegan Smith Lets
face it. Search Engines rule the World Wide Web today. Anytime you want
to look up some information or a product you want to buy, you put the
relevant keyword in the search field of a major SE like Google. And
Violį! The efficient little engine throws up pages and pages of website
URLs which carry your keyword. SEO
has become
the most popular and the most effective strategy for increasing website
traffic today. It gives you more exposure, pulls in more qualified
visitors and helps you substantially increase your income. So, if you
are a home based business owner with a serious web presence you would
know the importance of attracting quality traffic to your website.
Among all the strategies and tactics you can employ to attract focused
web traffic to your site, optimising your website to get in top SE
rankings is the most important. However to keep your rankings that way
you have to be on top of what is happening in the SE industry. To
understand how search engines work, spend some time at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,316408,00.html
Here are some great ways to optimize your site to get to the
top of the SE rankings and stay that way:
- Reciprocal links: Fish
out relevant (but non-competing)
websites that complement your services and products and ask them to
link to your site. It?s a big hit with search engines to see a large
number of sites linked to yours. However more important than quantity
is the quality of the linked sites. Search engines look at how relevant
the links are, that is, how much the content of the linking site has in
common with the content on your site. The more relevant, the better. SE
s also gauge the importance of these sites; their online presence and
the number of hits they get. In a nutshell SE s believe that company
matters!
- Keyword is the king:however
much the SE industry
changes its rules, algorithms, indexing methods?. the right keyword is
still the most important reason they will pick up your site to put on
their top result pages. So keyword inclusion and placement is very
important. The best places to place your chosen keywords are:
- Domain name: Putting
your keyword in your domain name is
both most obvious and the most important. But take care to put it in
the root of the URL, not in the stem?that could SE s angry and do you
more harm than good.
- Title
tags: in the
title tags of your source code
- Meta description: In
the Meta
description of your site.
- Meta
keyword tags
- CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT: Create
content rich
information pages to get traffic coming your way. A word of
caution?unless these pages contain information of some value to the
potential visitors SE s may not pick them up. Search engines hate
"pointer pages" that have no content and exist only to add to the
number of links pointing to a site.
- Online Directories: Almost all
major portals have
industry specific directories. Submit your website?s URL to directories
like Yahoo and About.com as well as smaller directories. This will
increase your chances of getting a boost in your SE rankings.
- Go
Forth and Multiply:
Create your own community of
sites that point to each other. A good idea would be to have different
sites if you sell different types of products and services. You can
also concentrate on using specific keyword phrases on each site. The
more content rich sites that point to your site the better. So that?s
another great way to boost your search engine ranking.
Now lets look at some of the most common
mistakes
that can prove to be the undoing of your website.
- The number 1 mistake is not putting enough CONTENT. Your
website
must have keyword ?rich content that adds value to the visitors? info
search. Without meaningful content your visitors can click out just as
easily only to never come back again.
- Using frames is a technique that makes the Webmaster?s life
easy
but can easily prove to be a major put off for SE s. SE s may find it
difficult to move around in frames and will fail to include all of the
pages in their list. These missed out pages will never show up to the
people who are looking for them and defeat the whole purpose of your
exercise.
- Enclosing text in graphics is another technique used by web
designers to give the website an even, uniform look for every visitor.
Unfortunately, SE s cannot differentiate between a photo in a graphic
and text in a graphic. Hence they will overlook it. There you go again!
Beat this problem by putting the real information in plain text that
search engines can recognize.
Being visible the Internet is the first
step to being found on the Internet.
So take advantage of these proven success tips and avoid the
traps
that will make your rankings fall down in the SE abyss. What you?ll be
left with is a great website ranking bringing in focused qualified
visitors to help you boost your sales.
For more information check out these websites:
http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol127/optimization.htm http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesTitle/productCd-0764567586.html
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