Optimizing your website for Search Engines
Important Suggestions
Using the tactics as described below your traffic will increase.
Lessons
Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all major search engine companies that employ very similar tactics for ranking, indexing, and maintaining information about millions of websites across the web, however Google does this best. Unfortunately the success of many websites are at the mercy of these giants, What rules does Google have to follow? None, in fact they make their own rules, standards, and indexing techniques. What does this mean for low traffic websites? Search Engine Optimization. It's almost like a forever open application that can be accepted one hour or denied the next hour. This is the basic premises of Search Engine Optimization, the constant battle of maintaining the 200 plus metrics Google uses to rate your site, otherwise known as PageRank, named after the founder Larry Page.
- Content and Users
The most important metric Google uses for ranking a website is the length, originality, and quality of a sites content. If a site A has 3 paragraphs of text versus site B with 3 pages of text, site B will most likely get a higher ranking, however more issues are likely to occur. If site B's text is full of keywords and is difficult to read it will discourage users from visiting website B again, in addition to 3 pages of content, none of it can be copied from another site or else PageRank will be lowered. Periodically updating content can also help boost PageRank. - Links and Link Structures
Another very important aspect of SEO is gaining incoming links to your website. However the incoming links are not as effective if they are reciprocal links, meaning both you and the other website owner linked to each others websites. When Google sees a non reciprocal linking they see this as an indication of quality website content because it took someone to recognize the significance of linking to your website. This technique is also most taken advantage of through the use of link farms, webpages that have 100+ links to an assortment of other websites, sometimes these services are paid for, however they are strictly prohibited under Google's policies, and may result in a blacklisting(removal from Google's rankings). Another very important thing to remember when making links is choosing the right keywords or phrases to be displayed, they are looked at by Google, and Google takes link keywords into consideration when making a ranking. Don't put on your website "You may enter here", instead something like "You may enter the dark cave for a tour." Would yield a lot more power because Google would be associating dark cave tour with what the link was pointing to. Setting up an internal link structure that is easy for users to remember is as just as important as setting it up for Search Engines. Having links like: www.example.com/index.php?content=23ergcwwe34 versus www.example.com/account/profile allows Google to reward your site with more PageRank. Also making sure that all links work on your website is important. The entire purpose of making a simpler link structure is to simplify the work that Google's webbots have to do on your website and the ease of navigation by user, since Google wants to recommend good sites to users they like to see clean traditional websites. - Embedding and Choosing Keywords
Researching keywords relevant to your website is a very good idea. When writing content keywords and key phrases can be uniquely incorporated into the content without the user noticing. This is the best possible way to put keywords onto your website because Google sees the content as an explanation for the keyword and therefore deems it worthwhile for the users to read. Choosing unique or underused keywords is the best possible approach to embedding keywords into your site. The keyword "Hotel" is going to have a lot more competition to rank higher for than the keyword "Pacific Beach Hotel". - Conclusion
Those are the basic three keys to boosting your website traffic. Using Google Analytics you can track users on your site and see exactly how long they stay on, their bounce rate, page views, browser type, monitor size, repeat visits, and many more. You can effectively plot your traffic by your user's behavior. If 5,000 or so people visit one particular page on your site, then search rankings and relevancy must be high. Google has also made a tool called Google Webmasters where you can see the keywords used to find your website, and your website's ranking for that particular keyword. Through using these two tools and implementing the above techniques, Search Engine Optimization will most always be a success. My website went from PR 0/10 to 3/10 using the three techniques listed above.
You Know...- how to write your content
- how to keep visitors on your page
- how to gain incoming links, not reciprocal
- how to embed keywords in link text
- how to write good link text
- how to setup a good internal link structure
- how to embed keywords in content text
- how to use Google Analytics and Google Webmasters
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