The lifeblood of any website/ecommerce business is traffic, and every webmaster knows the best type of traffic is natural, organic search engine traffic. There are two very important reasons for this: (1) it is extremely targeted, and (2) It is FREE! The hard part is getting top ranking for your sites keywords... or is it The purpose of this article is to provide a few simple, effective, and most important, search engine friendly strategies to help boost your websites ranking and ultimately your traffic.
1. We will start with the Meta Tags. I know you have already heard of, and are probably currently using meta tags on your site. This is great. I just want to make sure you are using them effectively. We will only go over 2 tags: the title tag, and the description tag. We will not go over the keywords tag, as the major search engines have placed less and less weight on this one, and some would argue this tag has no weight at all. I still use this tag however, as I feel there is some merit and no drawbacks to using this tag.
I have found it effective to use similar text in the title and description tags, and to place your keywords prominently in these tags (near the beginning and more than once). I have seen sites with sitename.com, New Page 1, or Welcome to my site in the title tag, which really does not help in their quest for higher rankings for their particular keyword. Also, try not to use words such as and, or, or the in these tags.
**Important note about your keywords. Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a sites ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as keyword stuffing and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.
2. Place your navigational links (and JavaScript) at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines read your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your heading tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to whats important on your page.
3. Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot read pictures or images. The only way a spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your pages keyword weight/density. Alt tags are easy to make and they can make a big difference in your sites keyword ranking. A simple alt tag looks like this: alt=put your keyword phrase here. Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.
4. Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just as search engines place more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same to the last words. The general thinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, then the main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning, be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at the conclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links and JavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end well before the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in the copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food website, you could have something like this at the very bottom of the page:
copyright 2005 yoursite.com
Worlds best dog food
Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sites using this technique, and it wouldnt really make much sense for them to do so.
5. The Anchor Text of your links. Anchor text is the actual linking text on a site. It is what the user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term dog food, then the search engine concludes your site is about dog food. This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as Click Here or www.yoursite.com
Also, if youre running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure to use variations of your text. If an engine notices every link to your site is identical, it could place less weight on these links or potentially penalize your site. This is because search engines generally give more weight to naturally occurring links, and less to reciprocal link exchange campaigns. Using different, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect your targeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear more natural.
Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your websites keyword ranking.
Noah Ulrich is a successful internet marketer, and webmaster ofInformativeresources.com. His site maintains top rankings in all major search engines. He has owned and maintained an online presence since 2001. His site provides top quality resale rights, guaranteed signups, and to businesses all over the world.
From smart SEO strategies to paid results campaigns, from press releases to targeted emails; everything is valid to increase your exposure and boost your business, however the Full of Aces in this game is called Content.
Many tactics, great products and state-of-the-art technologies can be applied in order to gain traffic and therefore improve your leads generation and sales, but none of the methods can be successfully accomplished if there is not relevant content into your web site.
Content gives body and soul to your site, and there is no other way that Search Engines can understand what your site is for, or how to categorize it and place in a suitable position into your niche market. On the other hand its true that we can read texts inserted into images, but why should we do that Sometimes titles or headings need to have a special design or look-n-feel, but even in those cases there are techniques to add meta-text to those images for a satisfactory search engine crawling.
Each search engine gives content a special weight into their formula as there are other parameters that are involved into their algorithms, as link popularity and web site structure for instance, but again: everything is about content: quality links are text based; web structure must have readable content and even pay per click campaigns are created with rich content characteristics!
There is no doubt: its natural that it happens this way as we humans communicate through content in one or other way, and the richest our contents quality is, the better we will be understood by our friends and niche market audience as well.
Doesnt matter which new methodologies will be developed into the Web Marketing world, textual content will be always leading the list of search engine optimization priorities.
Mr. Daniel Katz is the Business Development Manager at Compucall Web Marketing Ltd - experts in International Web Marketing and Marketing Strategies.