When it comes to the Internet, many creative ones like yours truly, dream of starting a website or blog to express ourselves. Unfortunately some of us rush into this, create the website and wait for web visitors to come and when they don’t we wonder what we did wrong.
When I created my first website, back in 2005, using Yahoo Sitebuilder, I immediately when to Google and did a search for it, and guess what, it didn’t show up. I kept clicking next 10 results, next 10 and so on. I probably did that 10 times and did not see my website which was exactly on topic for the keywords I searched for.
Then I emailed an ‘Internet friend’ who just happend to be a master SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Expert. And that’s the first time I heard about that acronym.
But to keep it simple, it means optimizing your site so it gets found by the search engines. In this post, I will share with you the 4 basic elements to building or optimizing a website so it gets ‘found’ by the seach engine. In other words get website traffic.
Here goes:
1 Tag your relevant keywords
If you do not tag your keywords, the search engines will not find your website. There are several types of tags
Title Tags This is what appears at the top of your web browser when viewing a page. You can add your keywords here by going into your web page code and inserting a descriptive title with your keywords in it. It should look like this <title>Descriptive Page Title about Internet Marketing </title>
Keyword & Description Meta Tags Also located in your page’s html code. Use the Meta description tag to do just that, describe your website. Also keep it brief, only about the first 60 characters will be visible on Google and most search engines. Keyword tags should be your keyword groupings, about 3 to 5. i.e. “Internet marketing”, “Make Money Online”, “Online business”
Alt Tags These tags are used to provide a text description of images on your site. Assign a description and keywords to each image on your website.
2 Content, Content, Content
This can be a challenge even if you are really passionate about your topic which you should be. Personally, I say about 3 times a week or even once per week, if you have a blog. If its a static website, then add content regularly to flesh out the site, cover all areas of the topic, then decide on a schedule that’s comfortable for you.
3 Get reciprocal links
One of the ways that the search engines judge the importance or credibility of a website is by how many websites have links pointing to it. However, you need to specifically search for complementary websites to yours, sharing a similar topic or subject area. As for the webmaster’s of these sites to add your website link to theirs in exchange for a link on your website.
4 Submit your site to the search engines and directories Add your website link to Google, MSN, Ask and Yahoo. These are the major search engines. Also, add to directories like the Open Directory Project, dmoz.org. This particular method though is a ‘do-it-and-forget-it’ type of thing. Don’t go crazy. For instance it takes months or even years for a website to get added to dmoz.org. Just do it and go back to creating quality content for your website.
There are many different ways to build traffic to your website, but these are the basics. My advice is to optimize these before diving into other areas like social media marketing, advertising and more.
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