Keywords An obvious first choice but still probably the most importantant element of a websites content. To the uninitiated a website isn't categorised by its graphical content but its words. It's therefore vitally important to make sure your website not only looks good visually but has enough content stuffed away in the outer margins to keep the search engines happy. An important point to make here is to not stuff too many keywords in arbitrarily as Google being the swine that he or she is will soon be pulling your pants down for that schoolboy trick.
Quality Incoming Links Google devised the process of ranking a website by the ammount of other websites linking to it and supposedly therefore being the most popular and useful for those search terms. However the search engines are now moving away from this method of ranking now that every Tom, Dick and Harry is swapping links with one another. It's still a good idea to get as many incoming links as possible but don't bother with recipricol link schemes as its a waste of everyones time
Meta Tags These are the bits of code that form part of the description of what it is exactly your website does or services you offer or sell. Again, these, in the internets infancy, were all you needed to worry about. Simply type a few suggestive words in your description and keyword meta tags and see your website rise above the filthy competitors. Nowadays a bit more effort needs to be done to keep your website high among the rankings though its still neccesary to use these meta tags
Useful content The smart money for the forseeable future among hardened SEO's is to make your website useful. Provide some quality tutorials like this fine specimen or better still offer free downloads or something that people will find indispensible.
Try to keep abreast of what is going on in the world of technology and weep with despair Podcasts are all the rage at the moment or at least they were until yesterday lunchtime, now they're probably met with incredulous derision among the cognescenti. Other things to try and understand are RSS feeds - your guess is as good as mine, Blogs - which seem to be like sad online diaries as far as I can make out and user powered content sites wherby geeks worldwide sit at their consoles and vote on things that interest them which pretty much rules out anything I can comprehend. Be sure to implement all this somehow and you'll see your website sitting pretty on that ever encroaching monster - google.
One of the most critical things you can do to raise your search engine rankings and bring more traffic to your site is to convince other websites to link to yours. Running a linking campaign is free, of course, and it is not rocket science, but doing it well does take significant time and effort. I recommend a couple of ways to find websites which might be willing to link to you. One process begins with an online search to identify websites with information about the same subject as yours. If your website is about about athletics, you could use search terms like "physical conditioning", "athletic gear", "endurance training", "running shoes", and "tennis tips" to find sites which may be interested in adding a link to yours. Or, you can simply select a popular site in your niche and identify the websites which link to it. It's easy. Search Yahoo or alltheweb.com for "link:" (without the quotation marks) and the entire URL of the popular website. For example, link:http://www.online-degrees-and-scholarships.com (be sure to include the colon after the word "link"). At some point you will probably want to spend between $50 and $125 for a piece of software which can automate much of this process for you. After you have located the websites most likely to link to yours, visit them, obtain the email addresses of their owners, and request a link. You are likely to get the best results if your email is brief, polite, and well written. The description of your site must be interesting and explain why the webmaster's visitors will find it helpful or enjoyable. Be persuasive but avoid hyperbole. Offering an incentive may also induce webmasters to link to your site. For instance: a. offer a link on your site. b. offer information or products of value. A vacation discount certificate, the URL of a website offering a free online calendar, or a free contact management program are just a few examples of items incentives you can offer in exchange for a link. You can easily contact 30 webmasters a day. Even if you convince only one out of ten to link to you, you'll reap 90 new links a month. With link building software, which automates everything, contacting 200 website owners daily is a piece of cake. If you follow this advice, you should experience an almost immediate, albeit modest, increase in visitors to your website. However, the biggest benefit of a good linking campaign, higher search engine rankings, will take a bit longer. There is no magic formula, and there are lots of variables, but your search engine ranking could improve in as little as a few weeks, and should continue to improve as time goes on and more sites link to you as both a direct result of your efforts and webmasters seeing your links on other sites. If you have the motivation and self-discipline to persevere, you will almost certainly continue to improve your site's search engine rankings. And, as your search engine rankings improve, your traffic will grow correspondingly. Assuming that you offer a product or service visitors find attractive, a well-conceived, ongoing link building campaign can be the key to achieving, and maybe even exceeding, your most optimistic revenue goals.
Both Farquaar & Ellen Sherman are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Farquaar has sinced written about articles on various topics from Web Development, Site promotion and Web Development. is your single point entry into a . Farquaar's top article generates over 18100 views. to your Favourites.
Ellen Sherman has sinced written about articles on various topics from Site promotion. . She holds an undergraduate