Introduction of Search Engine Optimization
Posted on 12. Aug, 2009 by admin in search engine optimization
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and is the process of designing, building, and promoting a website with the search engines in mind. The purpose is to rank well in the search engines, which will then in turn provide you with organic search engine traffic. Organic traffic means free traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important if you ever want to gain decent rankings in the search engine. Even though the word “SEO” can sound intimidating, actually applying it to your blog is not as hard as it sounds. All you have to do is invest some time in the beginning into learning the basics, and soon your blog will be better than many others out there, simply because you have done what the search engines want – SEO.
SEO is not only the initial design of a website, but the promotion as well.
Before I go any further, I would like to talk a bit about the many advantages of SEO, and why you absolutely need to apply it to your websites or blogs
The Advantages of SEO:
- Free Traffic
- Makes your website more “friendly”
- A lot people don’t do it!
- It will increase your profits
As you can see there are several reasons why you should be doing SEO.
Before we start tackling SEO, I would like to first talk a bit about how search engines work. It is very important that you know the basics of how they work, because SEO is essentially all about doing what we can to please the search engines.
Search engines gather data from any website they can find. Search engines send out little helpers called “spiders” and they crawl the net, putting their webs out and gather and store information about everything that they find. The search engines then rank the websites in order of importance, based on a variety of factors. They also penalize and reward websites, based on what they find.
Important factors include:
- Number of quality of backlinks
- Freshness of content
- Uniqueness of content
- “Authority” status
- Age
Our goal then, is to provide the search engines with a website or blog that the spiders have determined to be valuable. That way we can achieve a high ranking which will in turn bring us traffic.
How to Increase Website Traffic
Posted on 10. Aug, 2009 by admin in search engine optimization
Website traffic means one of several things. Website traffic could mean the number of hits, the number of page views, the number of sessions or the number of unique visitors. When it comes to increasing website traffic you want to determine what you are looking for.
I want to focus on targeting visitors to your website that convert to a sale and the first important step to increasing website traffic is SEO. Search engine optimization has been put out on the Internet as something that only webmasters can do. Not so. Let’s forget about algorithms and other complicated bits of the puzzle and simplfy it.
SEO involves finding unique and appropriate keywords that best describes your business. Keywords could consist of single words or two-five words, sometimes known as long-tailed keywords.
The second step to increase website traffic is to consider how many times you use these keywords on the pages of your website. 5% appears to be the norm, any more than that and you will appear to be ‘keyword stuffing’. On any web page try not to use any more than 5 keywords per 100 words of text. I use the rule 5/5/100. 5 keywords/5 times/100 words of text.
When you create your webpage use your keywords in the page title and higher up in the text. Have your keywords in the Meta description and Meta keywords. Alt tags, headers and all links on your webpage will increase website traffic. Linking to similar or complementary websites will enhance your presence on the web and increase website traffic.
