The basics of SEO
Ben Fairless (Other / Beginner)In order to bring traffic to your site, being high up in a Search Engine such as Google is vital in order to gain targeted traffic. The science of improving your rank is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This involves making a few changes to the way your site is coded and the way you run it in order to improve your rank.
The following simple steps can completely turn around your visitor numbers. Only yesterday I managed to jump from the 200th+ link to 3rd in a Google search for one of my keywords, using the following simple instructions.
Firstly, something that is important is to figure out what people will search for which your site features, for example if you run an online game shop people will most likely such for 'Cheap PS2 Games' etc. so draw up a list of things people will look for.
Next, you need to implement this into your code. This is a simple process and can be done really easily. This requires the use of META tags, which are small pieces of code in the area of a HTML file which instruct your browser, and more importantly search engine web-crawlers, what the page is about.
The following piece of code is the a Description Meta tag, this tells search engines what yours site is about. When writing your site description try to keep it roughly 200 words in length and try to use as many keywords as possible.
<meta name="description" content="Put a description of your site here" />
Another Meta tag is the Keyword Meta Tag, this is basically just a list of keywords,
although many search engines no longer use this tag it is still important to put it
in to help with those search engines which do still use it. The code for the keyword
meta tag is
<meta name="keywords" content="divide, keywords, with, commas" />
NB: Make sure you put these pieces of code within the tag of your page.Also try to make the title of your page descriptive using as many keywords as possible. Instead of using 'SITENAME.COM - Online Game Store' use something like 'SITENAME.COM - Cheap games for PC, XBOX, PS2, Gamecube'. This example means that someone searching for 'PS2 games' may come across your page.
Another trick is to keep your pages simple to remember, rather than having 'http://yourdomain.com/0123.html' use something like 'http://yourdomain.com/store.html', this can be done manually or by using a technique called mod_rewrite. Many search engines place pages such as these higher up in their rankings so it is a useful technique.
Also try to make the content of your site as descriptive as possible and mention keywords frequently. When crawlers come across your site they will pick up on these and it will increase your rank.
A final technique is to get one-way links from sites that have a similar topic to yours. A one-way link is when Site A links to Site B but Site B does not link back to Site A. Search Engines see this as meaning that your site is an important resource. Try to get these links on large sites which are already popular with search engines, this will increase your PageRank. A good way to do this is advertising, which increases your traffic dramatically so it is good to do anyway.
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