The ultimate goal of anyone running a website is to attract visitors. Without any traffic, a site isn’t going to do much but take up cyberspace. There are many ways to attract traffic to your website and you should be trying various techniques in order to do so. This article will focus on increasing traffic through search engine optimization.
In the past, doorway pages were all the rage. Everyone was scrambling to create hundreds and thousands of pages to essentially trick search engines into leading people to their sites. It seemed unethical to me, and I figured that the engines would pick up on this and bring it to an abrupt halt, which they have. Search engines want pages with content, making doorway pages obsolete.
Most websites consist of several pages. Each page covers a specific but related topic with a navigational system that links each page to all other pages on the website. A navigational system is a must for a quality website.
If you have a site on Internet Marketing, for example, you already know that this subject encompasses many topics. Each of these topics deserves its own page, making it a ‘doorway’ all by itself. If you optimize each of these pages as if it were a doorway page, you will have a good chance of ranking in the search engines. Make sure that each page sticks to a particular topic and write your meta tags accordingly.
Here are some guidelines for top placement in the Search Engines:
• Try to limit your meta keywords (preferably phrases) to three. The worst thing you can do is to have a gazillion keywords. Your relevancy will be shot. You may get listed, but you will be ranked number 3,583,204 and no one will be able to find you.
• Do not use the same keywords on every page. Each page is different, so make the keywords different.
• Make sure your keywords appear in the title tag, description tag, and all over the rest of your page, especially near the top.
• Refrain from listing keywords that do not appear on the page. Lists have been circulated showing the “most searched for keywords”. They generally consist of words like: sex, naked, women, gay, adult, erotica etc.
Don’t even go there. Do you really want people going to your site that don’t give a hoot about what you have to say? These visitors are not interested in what your site has to offer. You are wasting your time as well as theirs.
• Use keywords in comment tags, alt tags, and in header tags. You can also use a clear 1×1 pixel image and load the alt tag with keywords.
• The very first thing that should appear on your page is a statement of benefits that is rich in keywords similar to your description meta tag. Some search engines ignore your meta tags and print the first words on your page as the description in their listing. If your navigational bar is at the top of the page, that is what will show up in their description. This is not good.
• Header tags, (H1 for example) are very important. Search engines read the header tags and use them for paragraph headings instead of font tags, and load up the Keywords.
• Forget the bouncing flash and glitz. Although they are fun to play with, many search engines are not impressed. Search engines may even be hampered by this as far as indexing your page. Frames, flash movies, CGI scripts, javascript, applets and image maps are all complete junk to a search engine spider. Not only that, this sort of thing will actually push your real content further from the top of the page, reducing the relevancy of what the spiders actually do see.
• Keep spiders happy by feeding them lots of relevant content.
• Get a Domain! A top ten listing is virtually impossible to achieve without having your own registered domain name.
There is no magical formula for getting a top ranking in search engines. Currently, there are over 5,000 places to register a website and this number is increasing daily. In reality, about ten of these search engines will produce 90 percent of your search engine traffic. The larger search engines, like Excite, Lycos and Alta Vista, are visited millions of times a week and offer the most comprehensive type of searches for Internet surfers.
Windsong is webmaster, editor and publisher at: http://marketing-resources.com/
