It s one thing making a website that looks nice, but getting it noticed by other people is a different matter entirely. Even if a website provides informative content on a popular subject it may still only attract relatively few visitors. One of the most proven and reliable methods of improving traffic is through the use of search engine optimisation (SEO).
Let s say that you ve just created a new website on a particular topic. Your site will be so new that it wont be listed in a prominent search engine result page. There are a number of techniques you can employ to give you a competitive advantage over your competitors so that over time, your website should appear above your competitors sites in the listings when people search for relevant keywords. Whilst the search engine companies themselves will keep the criteria they rank webpage by a secret, there are a number of generally accepted practices and techniques that you can use to improve your search engine position.
If your website is full of excellent and interesting content as we alluded to above then you have already done the most important thing you can do to a website. Without strong content, all the SEO trickery in the world wont get people to stick around to read what s on your website. If your website is a personal project that you do for fun then the amount of visitors you do or don t get may not be an issue, however if your website is likely to be your main source of income then attracting web traffic is essential. There are many legitimate ways of letting search engines know what your website is about. There are also a number of riskier techniques that can be used to exploit the way that search egnines rank websites. Opinion can often be divided over which technique is which, making SEO something of an art as well as a science.
As well as the main content on your site, it is generally recommended that you place relevant keywords in the meta title of each page as well as the headers. This will give a clear indicator to the search engines as to what each page is about. But how do you know which keywords to use?
You should research what keywords people are likely to search for in order to find your website. Google provides a tool which will tell you the volume of people that search for particular keywords each month. There are also off the shelf packages you can purchase which will give you an alternative take on these search volumes. You may also wish to try analysing sites belonging to competitors to see what keywords they have used in their titles and headers. When using these key phrases it is advisable to try and include them in the body of the text on your pages. Don t overdo the use of these words as it may cause the search engines to label your site as being spam. The reader may also find the text a little awkward to read as constant repetition of a handful of phrases is not a natural way of writing.
So far we have only scratched the surface of what SEO is, but this should give you enough of an insight to get started. For more information there are no shortage of resources available on the web but do make sure that you seek second opinions on everything that you read until you form a concensus as to how best to approach your SEO campaign.
Author Resource:
Dave Matthews is writing on behalf of Fluid Creativity (http://www.fluidcreativity.co.uk), specialists in web design and SEO, Manchester, UK.
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