For most websites, the only way you`ll gain any significant long-term traffic is through the search engines. How else will the world discover and decide to investigate your otherwise-unknown website?
There are many other ways to attract traffic but the search engines are one of the most efficient! If you agree with that assertion, then the question becomes how do you attract enough long-term search engine traffic to your website to make it viable? I say long-term because many strategies such as pay-per-click and traffic exchanges are short-term and resource intensive. We won`t to focus on something we can do once and forget it!
The solution is that you build your website to meet the search engines` criteria and your potential customers` needs at the same time. Right from the very start you build with your ultimate objective in mind. You build webpages that when listed in search engines will attract the right prospects to your site for a long time.
You begin this process by deciding what your business really is. What is your website really about? Who do you really want to attract? What topics will people coming to your website be looking for more information on? What problems will these people be trying to solve?
By clearly defining what your website is all about, you can come up with a list of keywords and phrases people would use in searching for sites similar to yours at the search engines. You want to build a very comprehensive list of the terms your ideal prospects would use. Brainstorm all of the terms that you think they might use. Then go to a site such as Overture and use their suggestion tool. See what terms people using your search terms also searched on in recent searches. The Overture tool that I use for this is at: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ I also subscribe to services that tell me what the most common terms are that people are searching on.
Next go to the search engines and do some actual searches on your top keyword phrases. Visit the top ten sites and see what other keywords these sites target. Look at their metatags to determine this. You`ll eventually end up with a very comprehensive list.
You want a very comprehensive list because you want to weave these keyword phrases that are searched on into your webpages as you write them. You want to use them in your web copy (use them in sentences or headings that sound logical when read). The search engines, in reading webpages and ranking them, look at what the page is all about. Make your page about whatever keywords you are targeting. Each webpage looks at factors such as keyword density and placement. I find that articles on a given topic have just about the ideal keyword density so I don`t spend too much time over-analyzing this.
Next, make it very easy for the search engines to recognize what your pages are all about. The formulas used by the search engines give a lot of weight to a webpages “title” metatag. Make sure that your title tag contains your most important keywords. Next, make sure that your page “description” metatag contains your most important keywords. If your page is structured with sub-heading, make sure these also contain your most important keyword phrases. Use the “heading” fonts to tell the search engines that this text on your webpage is a heading and therefore important.
Side note: The keyword metatag is decreasing in importance … primarily because so many people have abused it. I still use it on many of my pages though. As a second side note, make the title and descriptions metatags of each of your webpages different (unless they contain identical material). This causes different pages to be returned for differing searches.
While weaving your important keywords into your webpages, keep in mind that your target audience will be reading these. Make sure that your title and description yells to your prospect that this is just what he is looking for. What you ultimately want to do is attract people who are interested in exactly what you have to offer. When you attract the right traffic, you need to attract much less traffic to make the same number of conversions.
One of the big difficulties you face is designing pages that appeal to both the search engines and to your visitors. The search engines index word and give the most relevance to words near the top of your page. They don`t index images although they catalog them! The very highest ranking pages I have ever written contained no images – they were just my articles pasted into webpages. People really interested in the topic may notice that the page has no images but if the article gives them just what they need they are still likely to react positively to the page.
Your html coding and the location of page elements affect how your search engine listing reads. The code that makes your page look great and easy to navigate to the human is often the thing that those stupid search engine spiders index. That`s why you often see elements of your forms or cryptic descriptions in search engine returns. The search engine could not locate a good page description metatag or ignored it and just grabbed the html near the top of the page. Naturally, the way to defeat this is to have relevant text near the top of your html code. You can even go as far as to create special pages for certain search engines that tend to do well with a given search engine and then use coding to tell other search engines not to index these pages. That`s beyond the scope of this particular article though.
After your pages are “ready” for the search engines, you need to help them find your webpages. You can do this by submitting your webpages directly to the engines. However, some search engines only allow you to submit a few of your pages, so you want to make sure that there are links on your submitted pages that point to all of your other important pages. If you have a lot of these important pages you might need to use a site map or a similar tool. You want something within the first 2 or 3 pages of your website pointing to all of your important pages.
You want to submit to all of the important search engines. Unfortunately, many of them have started charging for indexing your webpages. If you are short on funds and/or want others ways to get indexed, you need to think of how you can get your webpages into a “path” where the search engines will naturally find them. Search engines index the pages submitted but they also index significant pages they find. Your job is to place as many optimized pages as you can into paths where the search engines will find them.
You do this by:
– Placing highly optimized pages on mini-sites. These pages can be an article or information page targeting your keyword phrase. Only target two or three keywords on each page. The pages can even be on mini-sites on free web hosts. They tend to do better if they are on sites with domain names relevant to your topic but pages on free sites can serve as great pointers to your site. Be careful not to place identical pages on many different sites. The search engines will recognize the duplicate content and may simply ignore all of your pages.
– Submitting your articles to article directories. These directories are indexed and the links point back to your site. People who read these articles filled with solid information want to learn more and visit your site. These articles serve to not only get more links pointing to your site, they also serve to position you as an expert. If people see article that decisively demonstrate your expertise, you become someone your prospects naturally think of when your target topic comes up.
– Submitting your articles to article lists. Many of the lists cataloging articles which are available free to publishers are archived on websites. These archives are crawled by search engine spiders. Get your articles in these directories to gain more to search engine visibility.
– Submitting your articles to ebook authors. Ebooks that are passed around pass your url directly to your target prospects. Ebooks that are place on sites and in directories are also indexed by the search engines. I frequently come across returns in my research that end up being pdf formatted ebooks. The search engine technology allows many different types of media to be indexed.
– Submitting your articles to ezines. Many ezines are archived online and your material is archived along with them. This creates more links helping the search engines find your site and your pages. Again, you are not only building search engine pointers to your website you are establishing your expertise on that topic in the mind of your potential visitors.
– Get links at larger sites pointing back to your site. The search engines will give your site some relevance because of this, and may also follow these links to your site. This makes creating an about me webpage at Ebay worthwhile. It makes posts in Yahoo! groups worthwhile. Be constantly on the lookout for ways to ethically get your links visible on those high traffic sites!
Getting top search engine listings can be expensive, time consuming, and frustrating. Without good listing, your site may get very little traffic. The easiest way to get these listings is to design your pages to rank well from the very start. Feed the search engines a lot of very relevant pages and then concentrate on other traffic generation methods.
There are tons of tricks and tools that search engine optimization specialists use. Used improperly, they can get your site banned. I`m speaking of tools such as cloaking or “IP delivery.” For many marketers, these tools and techniques are not a very good investment of your resources. They require constant monitoring and constant study of what the search engines are looking for TODAY. The simple methods listed above work long-term and will deliver a steady stream of highly targeted traffic. Adopt a mindset that thinks get your keyword rich content into as many search engine paths as possible.
Willie Crawford has been teaching Internet marketing for
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