One of the best ways to get visitors to your websites is to use some special ‘search engine optimization’ (SEO) techniques that will attract HOARDS of free “targeted” traffic to your pages.
The ‘techniques’ I’m referring to here are NOT sneaky, deceptive tricks that will do nothing more than get your site BANNED from the search engines…
(Visit Google’s list of “Things to Avoid”: at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355)
…On the contrary, what I’m about to share with you are USEFUL tips that are sure to come in handy when ‘optimizing’ your websites.
Follow them and succeed. Ignore them and fail. It’s simple.
Search Engine 101:
1. Build your sites primarily for your visitors
First and foremost, center your websites around your visitors and their experience. Don’t build JUNK doorway pages just to get a ranking, but instead focus on creating REAL websites centered around REAL content, which again, is EXACTLY what the search engines LOVE!
2. Identify your target market
Know who you are targeting and identify the keywords and keyword phrases they would most likely use when searching for information. Not only will this help you better serve the engines, but the more you know about your site visitors the better you can “cater” your content to them, which also helps!
3. Use the proper ‘keyword density’ throughout your pages
Make sure your chosen keywords appear in your TITLE tag, your META tags and minimally in the few paragraphs and the last couple paragraphs of your content.
4. Keep your pages “focused”
Have each of your pages target one “main” topic or keyword. It is a lot easier to get your pages indexed properly if each page is centered around it’s own topic.
5. Keep your site design simple
Make sure the search engines can “read” your site by keeping your design as simple as possible.
6. Publish unique content
Attract search engine bots like magnet by publishing LOTS of quality, unique, original content that can’t be found anywhere else.
Search Engine 202
7. Create a simple “Sitemap”
Search engines use your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase their coverage of your web pages.
Your Sitemap should be simple, using text links to help both human visitors and search engine spiders. Use a layout with HTML links, which include keyword descriptions of each of your pages.
Your Sitemap should be linked to every page in your site, this way the engines can find and spider every page.
8. Keep your site freshly updated
Building your website with valuable, relevant and appealing content is a key element for success, but if your content is left static or is rarely updated, you will lose search engine ranking faster than you can get it!
Ideally, you want to update your sites EVERY DAY…
…which is a challenge for most Webmasters, especially if they have numerous sites to keep up with.
One solution I have found is to use a “random home page” script which shows your sites “home page” as a different article every 24 hours.
By using this script, your site will appear to be manually updated everyday, which is something the search engines look favourably on.
This simple solution has been shown to improve search engine ranking WITHOUT the need for continual updates and also provides “deeper spidering” of your sites, ensuring that ALL your pages get indexed.
9. Include ALL your pages in the Search Engine listings
Did you know that by linking every page of your website to all the others “in sequence” can result in some search engines failing to “spider” some of your pages – and thus NOT include them in their search listings?…
Most Webmasters are not aware of this, but by using a “random cross link” script each of your article pages will contain links to all your article pages – but selected at RANDOM!
This provides and incredible solution to the search engine spider problem, especially when used in conjunction with the random home page feature above.
10. Get other relevant sites linking to yours
Search engines measure the “value” of your website by the number and quality of “links” from other websites pointing to your site.
Getting a link to your site is like getting a “vote” for your site – the more votes you get, the higher you will rank in the search engines.
To have a decent search engine listing, you should focus some of your time on finding quality link partners within your niche to help your “page rank”.
Final thoughts…
While these are all excellent tips, still the BEST way to optimize for the search engines is to take a look at who’s already successful so you can duplicate their efforts and BEAT THEM in the rankings!
You will get better rankings more often by evaluating what your top competitors have already done, which frees up your time to create more websites, while THEY spend all of their time doing your research!
