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Best Ways to Build Traffic 1. Search Engine Optimization Here be dragons! There are lots of websites out there offering to optimise your website for various search engines. Some are genuine professionals, but others are, let's say, less genuine. So what is this "optimisation" thing anyway? Well, originally Search Engine Optinization (SEO) was all about understanding the search engines and how they indexed pages, and then applying that knowledge to things like META-tags in your page headers, or in the text on the pages themselves. This worked well for a while. And then Google came along and changed everything. Google goes out of it's way to mess with search engine optimization techniques, because it's their opinion that their customers are better served if THEY decide what your website is really about and how relevant it is, rather than letting you tell them about it. This actually makes some sense, particularly when you consider that many unscrupulous site owners were putting bogus META tags into their sites in order to attract viewers who thought they were going to see something completely different. However it makes life difficult for legitimate site owners who just want to get found. Google now changes their page ranking formulas regularly in order to beat so-called SEO experts, particularly those who try to trick them into changing their page rankings by doing things like creating thousands of single-page websites which link to a target site in order to make it seem more popular. So what can we do? In the first case we need to understand the primary basis on which search engines like Google operate. These modern search engines are primarily interested in just two things: 1. What the text on your site says (they index almost every word, and then check them to see if they sound genuine before assigning a relevance ranking), and 2. How many other genuine sites link to you (and the more important Google thinks the other site is, the higher it rates your site). So what we really need to concentrate on is: 1. Make sure your site says things in a way that search engines like, and 2. Get your web address on as many other websites as possible. Being Search-Engine Friendly The words on your website (especially your home page) need to concentrate on: 1. the actual services you are offering, 2. the key messages you want your customers to hear, and 3. the key words or phrases you think your customer will search on when they look for your services. Getting this right is quite a challenge, but we're happy to consult with you to get the best results from your website. Getting Your Name Out There There are a number of ways of getting your other websites to link back to your site. These include: 1. Link exchanges (not recommended - too much effort for too little return). 2. Paid Advertising (see below) 3. Building a great site with desirable content that others want to link to, and 4. Writing articles that are picked up by other websites and published. Of them all, I recommend option 4 as the best medium term strategy, and option 3 as the best long term strategy. 2. Writing Articles This is a huge topic in itself and one I plan to dedicate a few pages too later, but for now I've put together some links to sites that can help you in this regard. Click here for help on writing articles. Click here for help on publishing articles. How Will Writing Articles Help? There are hundreds of thousands of websites and eZines (electronic magazines) out there that need to source fresh content every week. Their owners can't write everything themselves so they rely on Article Banks for most of their new material. Each article contains interesting, entertaining, or informative material AND a few words about the author (YOU) and a LINK back to the authors website. It's not uncommon for a good article to be picked up by thousands of eZines and websites over a number of weeks, and each of those published articles represents another link from an external website - which gets noticed by the search engines and contributes to your page rank. 3. Paid Advertising This can't be ignored for the simple reason that it works. It may cost significant amounts of money (especially in the early stages) to get results from paid advertising, but there's no faster way to generate links back to your site than to pay someone to put your advert or banner on their website. And the more prominent websites (like Google or other pay-per-click suppliers) may even help your page rankings due to their own popularity. Having said that, it's no match for writing articles in the long term, especially if you're measuring it by dollars earned for each dollar spent. 4. Search Engine Visitor Monitoring One thing a good SEO expert will do is research the keywords regularly used by people trying to find sites like yours. This allows you to re-focus the text on your pages, and the terms you're paying for on services like Google-Ads in order to be found by more of your target market. Google makes some tools available for this kind of analysis, and other tools have been developed to help you take advantage Googles statistics when applied to your site specifically. We can help explain some of these tools and how they might apply to you. Ask us for a free consultation now. |