Search Engine Optimization For Everyday Folks
Everyone that wants instant web site traffic simply heads over to a search engine, and registers to get pay per click (paid) advertising, so when people search, their website gets listed. It can add up to quite a bit of money when you use ppc traffic.
If you do some search engine optimization, you can get the search engines to like your pages more, and then they will list them in the organic results (the results people see when they search).
Page Rank is this thing from Google (where Larry Page works), where each page on your site gets a ranking from 0 to 10, and supposedly, the higher the number, the better it is for you and everyone else. Getting a better pagerank usually means you get better search engine results on the search pages, so I am going to show you how to do some things to your pages that will increase your pagerank and give you better results on those search engine results pages (they call them “SERPS” ).
Does that sound cool? It’s easy stuff, and let’s get into it straight away.
1. Generate links on other websites pointing to your website, using popular keywords.
Having a lot of other sites pointing to your site is a surefire way to get the attention from the search engines. If those links use words that people search for, you have a shot at getting on the results pages of the search engines.
A great way to do this is to write informative articles and use the author box to link back to your site, then submit your article to many article directories.
2. Put your keyword in your title tag.
Putting your keyword in your title makes it show up in the very top left of your browser window, and tells the search engines what your page is all about.
3. Start your headline with your keyword.
Your headline is the big text at the top of your page (normally). Your keyword should be in your headline.
4. Put related keywords on your page.
Putting related words on your web page means it is designed to be read by others, and the search engines love these kinds of pages, and include them in their results pages.
5. Look at the source of your web page, and remove codes.
A lot of web page tools stuff a ton of programming junk at the top of the generated html file, and it confuses the heck out of the search engine spiders. Be sure to have any javascript or “css” stuff moved into separate files and linked from your main html file. That way, the spider bots can read plain english without tripping over squiggles and backslashes.
6. Put the full link to your internal HTML pages.
This means instead of linking to flowers.html, you should link to http://www.yoursite.com/flowers.html. This makes the search engines visit your other pages, and list them in their results.
7. Maintain your site.
If you page is old and stagnant, the search engines will drop your rankings, since they don’t know if it relevant any more. By keeping your site fresh and changing, they know it is a vibrant, living site, and that makes it worth listing higher in the results pages.
Put these tips into action, and watch how it improves your results, but in your listings in the search engines, and in the extra web site traffic it creates. SEO is easy, once you know the simple steps to take – so take a step now.
Filed under: SEO