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Best Ways to Generate Website
Traffic
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to Traffic Building Methods
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization, also referred
to as SEO, is the process of building and designing a website that is
able to achieve high rankings in the search engines
listings. There are SEO companies that will charge tens of
thousands of dollars for this because a high ranking under a few highly
search-for keywords in a major search engine can mean tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website each day or
month. This is free, organic traffic, the best kind there
is. It can result in a lot of revenue.
There is white hat SEO, meaning
optimization using honest techniques that the search engines respect and
reward, and there is black hat SEO, meaning optimization using dodgy
techniques such as doorway pages and cloaking that can get your website
banned from the engines.
Many SEO companies will guarantee that they will get you
at least one top 20 ranking in one of the major engines (Google, Yahoo!
and sort of MSN). This may sound like a good deal, but make
sure you ask under what keyword or keyword phrases your site will get
listed. It's quite easy to get a listing for a search term no one
is searching under, but it will do you little good. If you are
selling dog toys, a top ranking under "dog toys" would be
outstanding, whereas a top ranking under "red dog toys enjoyed by
collies" would not be worth much. If a SEO company cannot
guarantee under which keywords or keyword phrases your site will achieve
high rankings, move on to another company.
Overall, SEO is pretty basic. A few things to keep
in mind:
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Content is king. Write honest, fresh content,
and visitors will come. The engines will like your site as
well and reward it with good index placements.
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Write good, interesting and relevant content and
other sites will start linking to yours. Search engines,
particularly Google, will look to see how many links are pointed to
your site and use this to help determine your index rankings.
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Keep the site simple. Use few graphics or
flashy animation because these slow sites from loading and may block
the spiders the search engines send out to visit your site and
collect information about it.
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Use simple navigation. Make it easy for your
visitors to find what they want.
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Use black text on a white background for the
majority of your site.
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Link to other relevant sites. Place whatever
topic you are linking to in the text of your link.
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Each page within the site should be about one
topic. This topic is the keyword for that page. Each
page should target one keyword or one keyword phrase.
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Keep in mind keyword density which should be between
3% and 4%. This means if you have 100 words on your page, you
should have the keyword you are targeting on the page 3 or 4 times,
preferably toward the top of the page and in bold if possible.
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Each page should be titled the same as the keyword
or keyword phrase you are targeting.
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Each page's meta
description tags should match the title of the page.
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Each page's meta keyword tags should match the title
and meta description tags and title.
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Keep adding content to your site. The engines
like fresh content in their indexes.
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Remember that visitors will not all enter your site
through your homepage. Many will find you through other pages
in the site because these will be indexed by the search
engines. So the more pages you have, the more people will find
you.
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