A website is nothing without traffic and users, and getting it is harder than it looks like. Find out about the most important source of traffic, and how to take part of it, right here.
If you’ve ever done an online search through Google, Yahoo, Live, or any other search engine, you’ve probably noticed that the best results appear first. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO does exactly what its name says: it optimizes your website in order to climb up the search results ladder, and get listed among the best.
Among the things search engine “robots” look for, back linking is probably the most important and influential of all. Back links are all the links pointing towards your site found on other websites, and the bigger the linking website, the better. The more readers you have, the more back links you’ll get, because they will start promoting you on forums, or blogs.
Now, there are many ways to achieve this, and one of the most important steps to take is to revise your content. It has to be good and useful, and useful content keeps visitors interested, which in turn might become a back link from another website. Let’s see some tips that will help you out:
1. Use descriptive, keyword-rich titles:
Descriptive titles are very useful for catching people’s attention, and avoiding unnecessary bandwidth loss. A title like “How to replace a computer hard drive easily” is much more search engine-friendly than a title like “Replacing hard drives”. Try to use titles that are both descriptive, and keyword rich.
2. Keywords
Keywords are also very important for SEO. To choose them correctly, you have to know what people type in the search boxes when they look for something. For example, a traveler looking for cheap hotels would probably type “cheap hotels” in the search box. Once you find out, include these words in your articles or content, making it more accessible by search engines. Also, try to use these keywords at the beginning of your post, article or piece of information, because search engine robots look for the words placed at the beginning, and they offer a preview usually composed by the first phrases. It helps catch users’ attention, thus turning into another visit.
3. Get listed
Search engines sometimes buy information from web directories in order to have as many websites as possible. The most important directories are the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org) and Yahoo. If you get listed in the DMOZ or Yahoo, you will get listed in major search engines, including Google and Yahoo.
4. Modifying the inside
If you use a publishing engine such as Wordpress or Joomla, there are many SEO plugins available that will modify the inner part of your website (the code, etc.) in order to make it more search engine-friendly. Search for plugins containing the word SEO in each engine’s plugin directory to find out which ones you can use.
5. Sitemaps
Sitemaps are useful for SEO because it allows search engine robots to list every page of your website more easily. There are many plugins that will do them for you, just look around for them in your publishing system’s plugin directory.
6. Some things should be off-limits
Sometimes allowing search engine robots crawl all over your website is not a good idea. For example, if you have a membership website, or a paid download, there is a chance people will be able to get through without paying through a search engine. This is easily prevented by using a “robots.txt” in your database that will tell search engine robots not to list that part of your website. Try searching for “how to create a robots.txt file” to learn how to do it, it’s very easy to do.
These are the most basic aspects of search engine optimization that you should be aware of, but remember that this is not all there is to SEO. There are many other things you should do, but these should be good enough to start out before getting into the more technical aspect of SEO. Also, remember that getting to the top doesn’t happen overnight: it takes time, patience, and a lot of back links.