|
Your First Priority For Traffic Generation - Search Engine Optimization
There are plenty of ways to get traffic if you are happy to pay for it - like
pay-per-click advertising, and that may be an important part of your online marketing
strategy. But before you ever think about paying for your traffic, you'll
probably want to optimize your site and links to your site for the FREE traffic sent to you by
search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves and so on.
That's what Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is all about -
getting free traffic!
I'll describe some of the basic ideas here and then I recommend that you
download the eBook -
SEO Made Easy which will give you much more detail and provide links to
software downloads you can add to your marketing toolbox.
So, the basics in four sections:
- Ranking
- Keywords
- Cross Linking
- Content
Ranking
When you perform a search and search engine returns with 100's or 1000's of results, which links do you
click on? If you haven't found what you're looking for beyond the first page or two, you'll probably
give up with those results and try a different search.
This behaviour shows how important it is to be included in that first page of results.
The key element used to sort the results and so what will appear on the first
page is the ranking of the web site.
Google uses a page ranking score of 0-10 as one of the elements it takes into
account when ranking the results. 0 is the lowest rank and 10 is the
highest. You can see the ranking for any page you visit using
Google's toolbar (after installing,
choose 'options' and choose 'PageRank Display').
To improve your ranking carefully consider the keywords your site uses and
is based on, who links to your site and of course the quality, frequency
of change and quantity of the content.
Keywords
The words that a person types into a search engine are 'keywords'. If
your site uses those keywords in its content you could be included in the
results - 'yes, obviously' I hear you say. Well, obvious it may be, but lets go a
little further. The web sites included in the results for keywords
important to your site are your ranking competition. If there are 20 or 30
of them, great, even at the very worst you'll be on page 3... but what if there
are thousands or millions - then where will your site appear.
I'll leave this short peek at keywords with this tip: find keywords
relevant to your site, that have the smallest number of web sites in the search result
for those keywords and
optimize your site for those keywords.
Cross Linking
The number of sites that link to your site and most importantly the ranking
of those sites plays a huge part in deciding your rank. If you have 1000
links back to your site, that's good - unless those sites are all 0 ranked.
If you have 1, 2 or 3 links from sites that are very highly ranked, that will
have a big positive effect on your ranking. So, consider researching sites
relevant to your site that rank well in the search engines and approach them for
a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is simply, where you link to them and
they link to you. Of course, in most cases your site needs to be relevant
to theirs if they are to link to you - so approach those sites where you add
some value to their readers or subscribers.
Content
Lets assume for a moment that you managed to achieve a nice search engine
ranking (now, doesn't that feel good). If your web site remains static,
that is, no new content is added, over time its rank will go down and it will be
visited less often by the search engine bots (the search engine 'robot' crawlers
that index your site).
The bots love new content and the more you have the more frequently they'll
visit you to consume and index it. So keep your site fresh and growing!
There we are, gaining a high ranking isn't magic, but you do need to know the
rules. You're welcome to download your free copy of the
SEO Made Easy eBook containing 90 pages of advice, links and recommendations
on optimizing your web site to get your share of the free traffic.
When you've taken a look at the advice get yourself a tool like
SEOElite to keep your ranking high.
Copyright 2005, All rights reserved.
Clicks: 671 Votes: 3 Rating: 5 [Rate It]
Directory
|