When it comes to bringing traffic to your website, there are many methods that you may want to employ. Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a SEO, is one approach. The 10 SEO Tips provided here are merely the beginning, but will help you get started on the right foot with the creation of user-friendly web pages that are also easily understood by the most popular search engines. Please feel free to contact Wordsmith International for more advanced SEO tactics and other related search engine marketing strategies.
To begin with, it is important to realize that although there are thousands of search engines that exist today, only two of them are likely to deliver any substantial amount of traffic to your website. They are Google and Yahoo. Focussing your efforts on Google and Yahoo to begin with is therefore recommended.
10 SEO Tips for Beginners
1. Include the primary keyword or key phrase in the title tag of your webpage so that robots deployed by search engines can easily identify the nature of the content provided on your webpage. Including a keyword or key phrase here will considerably better the odds that you will attract targeted visitors to your website. Just be sure that the webpage's title tag is one that a person will be able to relate to as it is what will be displayed in search results.
2. Use the same primary keyword or key phrase to link to your webpage from other pages on your own website. The more instances of your primary keyword or key phrase linking to the target page the better.
3. Include the primary keyword or key phrase in the body of your webpage. Using the exact same text in the headline of your webpage will confirm for your visitor that they have in fact followed the right link and have landed at webpage they wanted to visit. Robots also appreciate it when the title of your webpage and the content you provide are clearly related. You may then include your keywords throughout the body of page, but do this with moderation. Do not repeat the same keyword or key phrase in the content of your webpage excessively. There is sometimes a fine line between optimizing a webpage for search engines and spamming.
4. Do not reuse the same title tag for every page of your website. Your pages may not get indexed by search engine robots if repeated title tags cause them to determine that all of your pages are the same. It is generally a good idea to use the headline of your webpage as that page's title tag so that search engine robots and people alike know exactly what your content is about. Search engine robots like it when you place your headline in the page's h1 tag.
5. Most SEO professionals agree that keyword meta tags are not nearly as important today as they once were, so don't waste your time risking your website will be labelled a spammer by cramming the keyword meta tag full of unrelated keywords.
6. Google cautions webmasters to not participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. 'Avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web especially, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.'
7. Create pages for people. Search engine don't like pages designed for robots only, known as doorway pages. They much prefer people friendly pages that provide search relevant text.
8. Include title tags (title="keyword or key phrase") in the HTML of text links pointing to your webpage from other pages of website to add weight to that link and the page where the link resides.
9. Include alt tags (alt="keyword or key phrase") in the HTML of images on your webpage. This helps search engines that index images to find your webpages and also make viewing your webpage easier on visitors who use text-only Internet browsers.
10. Submit your website to directories and search engines. Do this yourself, and only do it once. Automated submission software may result in your website being penalized, even banned. Search engine robots will follow the links on your website and index it in its entirety if it has a people friendly link hierarchy. The submission page for Google is http://www.google.com/addurl.html