Learn the Basics of SEO
If you have just finished building your website and are discouraged by the lack of traffic, then you need to learn about SEO. SEO is simply making your website search engine friendly.
When a search engine user enters a search term into their favorite search engine, those search engines use a ranking system to return websites based on relevance and popularity of the site. The higher your site ranks in the search engines rankings, the more likely the searcher will click on the link and land on your site.
The key is to have your site in the top ten listings for your keywords. The trick to getting your site higher in the rankings is through the use of SEO. SEO is something that must be ongoing with your site. You can start by learning how the search engines compute their rankings.
Many people think that the major search engines have virtually every page on the internet indexed. The truth is that any given search engine has less than 20% of the internet in their index. some sites are not indexed because they are new or just have copies of other content on the internet. There may also be technical problems with your site like bad robot text, or broken links that prevent the search engines from crawling your site. There are literally hundreds of factors used by the search engines to rank you site and all are important.
So, if we presume that your site is not technically preventing the search engines from looking around, then there are some fairly easy ways to improve your ranking. Having unique content is one very important step in the process. No matter what your site is about there are ways to keep the content fresh and unique. By adding a blog any site can be updated regularly with content specific to your niche. Be creative and think of what makes your business unique and add that to your site, whether it is product information, customer testimonials, pictures etc.
Some new marketers think there are ways to shortcut the process, but don’t be tempted these techniques will backfire and hurt your site. Techniques like keyword spamming, hidden text, link spam, meta tag stuffing and more will all end up hurting your ranking at best, and at worst will get you banned from the search engines all together.
After building your unique content, gaining links to your site will help increasing your ranking. Again, there are right and wrong ways to build these links. Natural, one-way links to your site are the best way to build your ranking and traffic. Having high quality content may lead other webmasters to link to your site, however these may be difficult to gain in the beginning. Links that can help can come from writing and submitting articles on your niche, commenting on articles or blogs, and posting to public forums. All of these techniques will help you gain exposure and increase in the search engine rankings.
SEO does require some effort, but the benefits are well worth the effort. Most successful sites receive more than half of their traffic from search engines. If your site is designed to be SEO friendly, then that traffic will be highly targeted to your niche. You can try to trick the search engines into sending traffic to your site by using less ethical SEO practices, but the traffic may not be the quality that will come from doing it right.
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Rob Emmerson is a leading expert in SEO and has written extensivly on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers a free step-by-step SEO Course at http://www.theseosecretrevealed.com . In addition he writes a daily SEO Blog at http://www.robemmerson.com where he shares tips and tricks to improve your SEO.
