To achieve success on the web, you need to have a thorough understanding of search engine optimization, or SEO, as it is more popularly known. Compared to the number of people who have heard of SEO, only a few know what it is and even fewer actually understand it. In reality, it is rather simple, and its main use is to drive one-way traffic to your site for free. It is time intensive, but with a bit of effort, you should start seeing results in a matter of weeks.
The first thing to understand is how search engines (Google, Ask, Yahoo etc) rank pages. Pages are ranked in line with their relevancy with regards to specific keywords that people use when searching for information on a given topic. The more inbound links that a site has from similar sites with high quality content/information, the better/highrer it will rank. Also, the more relevant and valuable the content of a site is, the higher that site will rank for a particular keyword. However, this doesn't mean that it will automatically rank as high for related keywords or key phrases. This all helps with SEO.
When people browse the web, the vast majority of us do not show any interest in those pages who are ranked number 200. We rarely go beyond the first 10 or 20 because we don't want to 'waste' time looking and sifting through hundreds of pages. The idea being that through search engine optimization, your site will rise up through the ranks by using fresh, keyword content that will attract the search engines and the resulting traffic. Subsequently, the more traffic your website generates, the higher it will be ranked in the listings. Consider how you search when you want to optimize your own website. For instance If you want to buy a book on search engine optimization, will you go all the way to page 30 to check the listings there? If you are like most people, then definitely not.
Next, very popular keywords which are used most often are going to have a lot of competition. So, you know that there are about 4 million websites on the Internet. Let’s assume that your website is about toys. Then, you will have “toys” as your main keyword. Now, if you search toys in any search engine, how many pages are there for you to view? You will probably find hundreds of thousands, of pages(maybe millions) and all the sites on these pages are your competition. When optimizing your site for a keyword, you are best off choosing the path of least resistance. This means instead of choosing the most popular keywords, you look for popular ones which are not as highly contested.
Thirdly, choose keywords that are easy for you to compete for. You then need to build pages which are based on these keywords which receive traffic, but have little or possibly no competition. As you do this, you will start building up pages that reach the higher and more contested keywords. Basically, you will be building a ladder that will let you exchange links with relevant sites and you then use their keywords as anchor texts in your sites.
Indexing your Site into Search Engines Quickly
Indexing your sites helps them to gain exposure. You can practically guarantee yourself a place in their “sandbox” by simply submitting your sites. But, you may still have to wait a while, possibly months, before they eventually get to indexing your site. Highly ranked pages get spidered more quickly and frequently too. So one way to get your site noticed quickly is to find a way to get your website’s link on a highly ranked page. If you do this, then the search engine’s spider will move into your site as well through that link.
One way to get your link onto these highly ranked sites, is to buy advertising space on them. Average prices for these ad spaces range from $10 to $25 for a set period of time depending on the site and once your ad is placed on their site, your site will get indexed. Once your ad space is expired, if you do not renew it, you still get the benefit of being indexed very quickly.
Yet another way to get your site indexed quickly is to join a highly ranked forum and post useful comments that have a signature with your website address in it. You can do the same on popular blogs. Remember to check that they don't use “no follow” tags, else your commentwill go unnoticed by the search engines. Make sure your signature always links back to your website. These are just some of the ways to get links on highly ranked pages. There are several other methods that you may use as well.
Optimizing Your Site for Free Traffic
This is important when building a website. In addition,to saving you a lot of money in advertising, it will always work. Organic hits are the considered best type of trafiic and if you receive all organic hits, this makes your site is very valuable. Particularly if you plan to sell your website somewhere down the road. One of the easiest ways to generate free traffic is to do link exchanges. You have to find other websites in your niche, and request a link excahnge. Basically, you place their link on your page and they will have to place your link on their site.. You can find sites that are into link exchanges at http://www.linkmetro.com.
Try to make sure that the sites you exchange links with are related in some way to yours. It is a very good idea to use keywords in your anchor text so that you have keyword optimization working for you as well. This is a way of telling the search engines what your site is all about. When writing your anchor text, try to have a few different variations. This means use different keywords so as to receive traffic from a variety of different keywords.
This helps you avoid duplicate content. At the same time, you need to keep your website’s content fresh by adding new content frequently, possibly daily. You can do this by setting up a content creation program and using it to add new keyword optimized pages to your website. This way, your website is continually changing. The more frequently you change change/add content to your site, the more frequently the search engine spiders come ther to index it. As a result, your website will begin to move up in the search engine rankings and improve SEO.
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