Search engine optimization requires a combination of elements. Highly optimizing your website Content and obtaining high link popularity from quality links will strengthen your search engine rankings over time. The diligence and level of effort at implementing these elements is directly proportional with the results you can expect to get out.
Your website represents your brand and while your website might have been designed and developed by someone the Content is vital to your brand and website. While a website might look visually appealing, these are usually overloaded with graphics and scripts which:
- Effect search engine rankings
- Robots crawling your website
- Load time for visitors
What’s the point of having a sports car parked in the garage all its life?
Every webmaster dreams of overloading the web hosting server with hits, getting traffic to your website from search engines drives your online presence. The basic and key approach to getting traffic is getting your website listed on page one on the major search engines for key phrases relevant to your website. While your designer or developer might have added a few keywords or phrases, getting there requires some creative writing skills, effort and diligence. A little knowledge about SEO (search engine optimization) as your webmaster can improve on this. Enquire about SEO if you have someone maintaining the website for you.
The following five indispensable elements should be incorporated into your SEO strategy will help you get started in helping your search engine rankings and resulting traffic.
Content! Content! Read all about it! :
Yes Content is King. SEO Research can be as easy as using your top search engine. Do a search on a topic of interest and see the results for Google, Yahoo, ASK, Alta Vista, Snap and MSN search engines. The result will include websites with articles and blogs (which are optimized for Content). Your Content must be optimized for the search engines and have optimal usage of your most important relevant keywords and keyword phrases. Create Content which is not only user friendly but keep in mind that you should be optimizing your pages with phrases that best match your overall theme. This is preferred by the search engine algorithms. Link Quality and Link Popularity is often mentioned first, however the exercise is futile if you do not have the Content to link to. The Link Quality and Link Quality Strategies help to drive traffic but more on those two in a moment.
Keyword Optimization
In order to improve the likelihood that users will find your website when searching for Content like yours, optimise your pages with the keywords or phrases that best match the overall theme of your website. Make use of short multi-word phrases and unique keywords consistently in the Content and website. First, find your optimum keywords and determine their popularity. Your top keyword phrases should be used within your Meta tags including your title, description, keyword and h1 through h6 Meta tags. Simply adding keywords to your Meta tags will not suffice.
Link Popularity
To increase your traffic, you must increase your link popularity. Link popularity is the number of links or inbound links on the internet that reference to your website. In bound Links can be obtained through various methods and if you have the marketing budget however, if you are on a budget you have various ways to achieve this. The methods can be varied in line with your theme but primarily webmasters make use of two methods. The first method is by exchanging links with other websites with similar Content. The second method is publishing articles or feeds online which are related to your website. The vital part in the strategy is including a link to your website in the article and then publishing the article on as many article directory sites as possible. The submission of Content and articles is the most effective method as it creates multiple one-way links back to your website. The diligent implementation of both methods should be part of the maintenance of your website.
Publishing Content
If the website is your own or represents your growing Brand write the Content yourself. No one knows what your business better than you. Most webmasters either lack the writing skills or lack the innovation or initiative to develop the Content themselves and therefore seek out good site Content. Webmasters with a budget often hire ghost writers. Those without money look to article directories to obtain some of their Content. Writing articles that relate to your Content and publishing those articles within article directories ultimately disseminates your link onto other websites. You are getting a one-way link from every website that posts your article. Top search engine optimization gurus exploit this strategy to drive their client websites to top rankings. How many reviews have you read lately?
Link Quality
Remember, link popularity is important, but link quality may be even more crucial. There are two facets to link quality. First, websites that are pointing to your website ideally must have related Content. Search engines will give links from websites with related Content more credibility. The second component to link quality is the actual words the other webmaster uses in your link. The goal is to ensure the links pointing back to your website include your most relevant keywords in the link title. Links from credible sources and websites with a high PR will only benefit you, whereas links from shady or spam sites WILL cost you dearly.
Word Count “Content” – 21
Word Count “Search Engine” – 13
Word Count “website” – 29
Word Count “site” – 32