Step 4 - Getting Visitors To Your Site - Part II - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This step focuses on how to get visitors to your web site for free, through using search engine optimization.
Basically, the goal of SEO is to make your site as search engine friendly as possible. What Google does is send out automated robots called "spiders", which crawl your web site and extract all the words and phrases on your pages and puts them in their index. In order to help the Google spiders you need to make sure you build your web site with these things in mind:-
If you are serious about getting visitors through SEO and want a quick and easy way to learn from an expert, then I thoroughly recommend "Seobook " by Aaron Wall who is the master of SEO. He makes a promise that if you follow his advice he will triple your number of visitors in 90 days or he will give you your money back. After having read his book I can certify I won't be asking for my money back - the amount of thought and knowledge that has gone into the book is amazing. The best thing about the book though is that its constantly being updated as things change in the search engine world, which means the information is always current. If you buy the book you get the updates for free, as well as free SEO tools that Aaron has developed. If you are looking for a no 'bs' book about SEO then this one is it.
That was a brief introduction to search engine optimization, I hope you found it useful.
The next step is the one you've been waiting for....How to make a lot of money through your web site, I'll be giving you my top tips....
Until then, happy keyword hunting!
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization is a fancy way of describing the process that helps your web site appear in the search engines. If you remember from the last lesson, the best way to get visitors to your site is through the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. By using SEO techniques it is much more likely your site will show for certain keywords related to your site eg. if your site was about dogs, and you have targetted the word "poodle", your site should show on the first page if someone types "poodle" into Google. If 1000 people a day type "poodle" into Google and your site is at the top of the results, you can see how you might end up with thousands of visitors a month. The best thing is though, you would have got all these thousands of visitors for nothing, no advertising spend whatsoever!That sounds great, how do I do this SEO stuff?
What I will try and do now is give you a brief summary of the most important techniques in SEO. I spent many months researching the topic as it can be quite involved, with a lot of conflicting advice. The best thing I did was buy a book by Aaron Wall, imaginatively called "Seobook ". It has loads of solid infornation and gives you a kind of roadmap of how to get thousands of visitors to your site through search engine optimization.Basically, the goal of SEO is to make your site as search engine friendly as possible. What Google does is send out automated robots called "spiders", which crawl your web site and extract all the words and phrases on your pages and puts them in their index. In order to help the Google spiders you need to make sure you build your web site with these things in mind:-
- Pick a topic for your site. Try and pick a topic for your web site that is not too broad - for example, instead of doing a site about dogs, do a site about poodles or spaniels, instead of a site about mp3 players, do one about iPods. This helps your site to be more focused and will make it more relevant in the search engines. It will also mean you will have less competition, currently there are 38.5 million web pages about dogs in Google's index, compared to only 0.5 million poodle web pages.
- Choose your keywords wisely. Before you start writing the content for your web site, make sure you do some keyword research. Keyword research allows you to find out what words people are typing into search engines such as Google and how many times that word is searched for each day. Most people use a tool called Wordtracker as it is the most accurate and useful of the keyword tools. This will give you some idea of what keywords are popular. What you want to do is use the keywords or phrases that Wordtracker suggests in your content, so that when people type those phrases into Google, your site comes up as an exact match. This part of SEO is really important and could be the difference from getting a few hundred visitors a month to a few thousand - make sure you use the keywords that people search for in your content.
- Choose a good domain name. This goes back to making sure you have your own hosting and domain. IX web hosting give you a free domain name when you sign up for their hosting. Having your site hosted properly will allow Google to crawl your site better. When deciding on a domain name try and include one of your keywords that you found in Wordtracker - it will give your site a boost in the search engine rankings.
- Page Titles - Make sure you put the important keywords you got from Wordtracker in your page title. Search engines put a lot of importance on the page title, in determining how relevant the page is for a search term.
- Use your keywords elsewhere on the page. Try and incorporate your keywords into your text, but not too often or the search engines will think you are trying to spam them. Try and use different versions of your keywords - as well using poodle parlours in your text, mix it up with say beauty shops for poodles, or parlours that cater for poodles. Use your keyword in a heading, perhaps put one in bold - just don't go crazy, try and make it look natural to anyone reading the page.
- Links, links and more links. Links are the most important part of SEO. A link is like a vote for your site. The more links you have, the more votes you have for your web site, which means you will rank higher for your keywords and consequently get more visitors. The best way to get links is naturally - people linking to your web site because it has unique content. These sort of links are the best kind of links as they will look natural to the search engines. You can also get links from such things as directories or putting an article on an article site with a link back to your site. An excellent list of directories and article sites you can submit to, is included in the "Seobook ". Try and avoid link exchanges with dodgy sites (porn, gambling etc) as they might harm your search engine ranking and may even get you banned. If you are going to swap links with a site make sure it has a similar theme to yours and has quality content that a visitor from your site may be interested in. Also if you can try and include your keywords in the anchor text, for example, if one of my keywords was apple ipod reviews I would make the link look like this - apple ipod reviews NB. make sure you don't use the same anchor text in every link back to your site, or again the search engines may think you are trying to spam them.
- General Tips - Make sure you have your own hosting and domain. Don't use frames on your site, otherwise search engines won't be able to find your content. Don't use javascript navigation on your site - again search engines can't read it, the same goes for using Flash - it may look pretty but its bad for SEO.
If you are serious about getting visitors through SEO and want a quick and easy way to learn from an expert, then I thoroughly recommend "Seobook " by Aaron Wall who is the master of SEO. He makes a promise that if you follow his advice he will triple your number of visitors in 90 days or he will give you your money back. After having read his book I can certify I won't be asking for my money back - the amount of thought and knowledge that has gone into the book is amazing. The best thing about the book though is that its constantly being updated as things change in the search engine world, which means the information is always current. If you buy the book you get the updates for free, as well as free SEO tools that Aaron has developed. If you are looking for a no 'bs' book about SEO then this one is it.
That was a brief introduction to search engine optimization, I hope you found it useful.
The next step is the one you've been waiting for....How to make a lot of money through your web site, I'll be giving you my top tips....
Until then, happy keyword hunting!