SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can seem a daunting topic when you are new to the internet. A professional SEO can be expensive but some of the most effective fundamentals can be done for free by yourself.
I'm not saying you will become a website seo expert overnight as SEO is a broad topic, but you can effectively optimise your site and increase relevant traffic significantly by following these tips.
Put simply SEO is the process of making your pages more focused, so the search engines are clearer what your page is about. There is nothing sinister about this technique, in fact it is fully approved by search engines as long as you don't take it too far by trying to spam them with 'black hat' techniques or irrelevant content.
Backlinks
The internet is built on links and search engines love them. As a general rule the more links you have to your site the better, but it's important that they relate to your website topic.
If you have site about internet marketing, links from sites about seo, making money online, and ppc are great so are sites about business, web design and I.T.. But a link from a site about credit cards is much less effective, it lessens the clarity of what your site is about in the eyes of the search engine.
What sites use to link to you is important too, this is called 'anchor text'. Somebody might find one of your articles useful so may put a link on his page that says 'this is good article about [web design]' (the [ ] bit is where they link your site - the anchor text). This is used by search engines to determine what your page is about, so the more relevant anchor text in links the better you rank for that keyphrase.
Note - This can be done manually if you have contacts on related sites, just make sure don't keep using the same anchor text over and over as the search engines may consider this unnatural and penalise you.
Keyword rich articles
You can improve the effectiveness of your articles by finding on a few keyphrases that are highly searched for by web users (google's keyword tool is good for this) and placing it in your article. This takes the guesswork out content creation giving you access to potential traffic.
Place the keywords or phrase into the headline of your article and then a few more times in the body. Try to get a density of 5-10% e.g. in an article of 500 words this would be 10-15 times before it gets too annoying. Make sure the article still flows properly for the human reader, avoid stuffing the keywords too much as the site will be penalised.
Alternatively articles you create can be submitted to article directory sites where you can choose which anchor text is used in the links to your site.
URLs, Domains and Meta Tags
A further step to laser-focusing the search engines on the topic of your page is by inserting keywords into your URL and domain name. The search engines will instantly know your site at is related to asian chimpanzees (unless you are spamming it of course). You can extend the SEO effect further by using the keywords in your URL by saving the filename thus brown-tree-chimps.html which makes the whole url /brown-tree-chimps.html. Of course use this technique sparingly and only use the chosen keyphrase of your main article as your filename.
The meta tags are hidden in the code of your site and also tell the search engines what your page is about. Make sure relevant keywords are placed in the title, keywords and description tags in a readable way as before.
These are three simple wasy to SEO your website, get into the habit of performing these tasks and you will notice a significant improvement in your traffic.
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