Site Tips

You did everything there is to do to get visitors to your site, and the traffic is slowly starting to pick up. The sources are diverse, which is a good thing since your traffic won’t drop too much if you loose just one source. Still, search engines are an important source of traffic and there are many things you can do to get more traffic from them. The goal of search engines is to give their visitors the most relevant sites possible. It’s up to you to make it easy for them find out what your site is about.

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the position of a website on the result pages of search engines. There is so much to learn about this, but in this lesson you’ll read about the best tips.

Tip 1. Use the Best Keywords

Find the best keywords for your site, and make sure you use keywords that people are searching for. You can do this by using a keyword tracker. There are many applications you can use, but I suggest you start with a great one that’s also free at http://inventory.overture.com Just type some keywords you’re thinking of using for your site. The results might come up with some suggestions that’ll result in more searches and keywords you hadn’t thought of.

Tip 2. Title, Meta and Other Tags

Use the keywords you’ve found in tip 1 and use them in the title, meta, h1, h2 and h3 tags on your site. You can put some emphasis tags <em> and <strong> around a few important words on your pages. Not only does it tell search engines these words are important for your website, it also increases the searchability of your site for human visitors. In the end, they are the most important people you are writing for. Apart from having different content on each of your pages, it’s also important to optimize the title and meta tags for each page.

Tip 3. Use Your Keywords in Links

Having many backlinks is very important for your ranking and you’ve learned how to get those in Lesson 1: “Get Incoming Links“. It’s also very important to have your important keywords in those links. If you have a blog about baseball, but everybody links to your site using the words ‘bat’ or ‘ball’, search engines can think your site is about animals or bowling and rank it higher in the wrong searches. This tip is also something you should be mindful about when using internal links in your site.

Tip 4. Write Good XHTML

A search engine has to be able to read and understand your page in order to determine what your site is about. Flash can’t be read, Ajax driven sites are difficult to understand at best. Iframes aren’t good either. The best thing you can do is write proper XHTML. If you want to know how a search engine will see your site, remove all styles (which should be in a seperate css files) and turn off javascript. Table layouts aren’t too big of a hurdle for search engines, but it’s a horror for people using text only browsers (think of visually handicapped people) since the reader doesn’t know in what order to read all the cells of a table.

Tip 5. Validate Your Code

To check your website’s code use these three links:

1. XHTML validation
2. CSS Validation
3. Link checker to check for broken links.

See how the right keywords were used in those links (tip 3)? Those sites will be so happy about that.

Tip 6. Create a Site Map

If you have a lot of pages on your site, consider using a site map page. This is basically a page that lists all your pages alphabetically or categorized or both, with links. This means that visitors can get to any page in just two clicks. Search engines can also easily find all your pages using the site map. Again, don’t forget to use the right keywords in these links.

Tip 7. Update Content Frequently

Search engines come back to check your site regularly. They do this to always have the latest information on your site so they can show more relevant information to their users. Search engines, as well as people, seem to love sites that update their content often. This way they can tell an active website from an inactive one, giving it more importance in the former case.

Tip 8. Use Friendly URLs

Often, search engines will not index all your pages if your urls look like this: http://www.example.com/index.php?page=365 and page=366 etc. Using search engine friendly urls is better and can also give a search engine an idea of what the page is about. An example url is: http://www.example.com/index.php/search_engine_optimization.html. Most blogging software has the option to turn friendly urls on and off. Turn it on if your host supports it.

Tip 9. Write For Human Beings

While writing content with keywords in mind, remember that it’s the visitors that are going to use your site. Write good, compelling content for your visitors and keep them happy. Search engines just want to give good results to their users. Write for your visitors, and you’ll almost automatically write in a way that the search engines find important.

Tip 10. Have Patience

Google uses an aging delay for new sites. This basically means your website will not rank high for some time even if it’s very good and relevant. The only way to overcome this is to buy an established website. Other than that, it also takes time for other webmasters to discover your website and link to it. As your site grows and builds a reputation over time, your ranking in search engines will increase as well.