Rob Emmerson’s SEO Blog

SEO tips for generating traffic

SEO is the most effective way to market your website.  Getting to the top rank in search engine results will dramatically increase visitors to your website.  The good news is that you can effectively practice good SEO without spending money. 

There are literally billions of websites on the Internet.  Because of this it is important to do everything you can to get your site noticed.  One key factor is to create quality, original content for your site. 

Keywords

The first step in the process is selecting your keywords.  Keywords are the words or phrases searchers will enter into the search engines.  Concentrate on identifying two or three main keywords to describe your site. 

Using keywords in your title

Once you have selected your keywords make sure to use them in your web page title. Use the minimum amount of words in your title, so you don’t dilute the effectiveness of your key word. Never use titles that might sound catchy or cool, but will never be searched for. For instance if your website is geared towards weight loss, and the keyword you want to use is diet; then a good title could be simply “Diet Pages.” A bad title could be “the boiled cabbage and pea’s diet.” First because, who wants the boiled cabbage and pea’s, but more so because it is a long and probably not likely to be searched for.

Make your site search engine friendly

In order to rank highly for your keywords the search engines will need to identify them on your website. The ideal rate of keyword density (the number of times your keyword appears), is 3 to 5%. In addition, emphasizing your key word or phrase once per page using bold, Italics or underline will help to draw the search engines attention to your keyword. Don’t overdo it, too many key words and your site will be flagged as spam, the same goes if you highlight too many. The result may be getting banned by the search engines in those keywords.

The importance of keywords in links

Keywords are important in links because they become your anchor text. Anchor text refers to the words that form your hyperlink on the page pointing to you. For example if I wanted to send visitors to my SEO Blog, I would use the anchor text Rob Emmerson’s SEO Blog. These are the key words that I use in promoting my blog. 

Each link that is seen by the search engines pointing toward your page counts as a vote for your website. The more votes you have in a particular keyword, the higher your site will rank for those keywords. One thing to always avoid in your anchor text is meaningless phrases like “click here” from an SEO standpoint they are not helpful, unless of course, you want to rank highly as click here.

Increase your links popularity

One important factor for link popularity is the popularity of the website where the link is placed. Your goal in getting links to your site should be to get the links placed on sites with similar content, using your keywords as your anchor text. Make sure the links pointing back use the most relevant keywords that you are trying to gain higher rank.

Links to your site are the most important aspect in gaining PageRank and appearing higher in the search results.  By building quality links with strong anchor text pointing back to your site you will rank better.

There are several methods to gain links to your site.  In general I don’t recommend buying links, and less you have enough of an advertising budget to sustain a long-term campaign.  Generally searchers prefer organic results, meaning non paid results, in their searches. 

Exchanging links with related highly ranked websites is one very effective method to build links to your website.  This can be done by contacting the webmaster and suggesting a links exchange.  On other way to gain links is by getting involved in your niche market, comment on Blogs, forums or even articles like this.  Generally when leaving comments you can also leave a link to your site. 

Rob