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Engine Positioning Strategy Guide to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Search Engine Ranking Strategies to
Increase Website Traffic
March 19, 2004
by
Vitus Chak
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical
to the success of your website. Google handles over 200 million
internet search requests each day, and people who search for information
clearly express what they want. Imagine capturing a relevant stream
of such web traffic. It's therefore important to optimize your
web pages to improve search engine rankings for relevant search
terms.
Search engine optimization brings you more than just a constant
stream of new visitors. It brings in targeted visitors, your potential
customers.
The search engine optimization process begins before you start
building your website, when you decide on the domain name to register.
The process then continues on as long as your website remains
online.
In this Search Engine Positioning Strategy Guide, I will share
with you the essential search engine ranking strategies to get
you started, and how our free website templates for Mergemill
help in the process. If you wish to learn more or seek search
engine optimization services, check out relevant Google links.
Please note that optimizing your web pages to get high rankings
takes time. Your rankings may start out low and slowly improve.
Link popularity, i.e. the quantity and quality of external
links to your web pages, greatly influences your rankings, and
it takes time for your website to become popular in its niche.
Every time you improve your site, you need to allow time for
the full effect to show in search engine results. Don't tweak
your web pages too frequently. The time and effort is better spent
on adding high-quality contents to your site and building inbound
links.
Web Site Layout
The easiest way to ensure you have a web site layout friendly
to search engines is to generate your web pages with Mergemill
and our free web templates.
Start with an outline or mind map
of your website. Organize your materials and spread them out in
logical units. Try to avoid having too many levels in your link
structure, otherwise some pages may need too many clicks to reach.
A good reason for a relatively flat web site structure is that
search engines generally prefer it. Google's PageRank
(*) for a web page drops as it moves deeper away from your home
page. You may reduce this effect by maintaining a site map and
place its link on your home page, but this is an extra maintenance
task that may not be necessary if you gives some thoughts to organizing
your site.
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of planning your website
carefully in advance, and the need to plan for growth. As I said,
link popularity is very important to your site. As inbound links
gradually build up, you must not change the URL of the pages they
point to, otherwise you will break all the links and may have
to start from square one again for those pages.
This means that you need to do your keyword analysis
carefully, so that as you add each new web page, the appropriate
search terms are used in names of folders and file that form the
URL of the page.
Keyword Analysis
You may not believe this. The search terms you consider perfect
for your website are often not what people actually use in their
search requests. Target the right keywords and see your web traffic
skyrocket.
Throughout the whole optimization process you are targeting a
few selected keywords with each web page. It is very likely you
will end up with a list of specific search terms after your keyword
research. You then decide on their priority and work the relevant
keywords into each web page title, content text, meta tag and
URL as you build your website.
Use a keyword suggestion tool to find the right search terms
for your web pages. You may use Overture's free tool, which is
available at the bottom of their Precision
Match sign-up page.
Before you decide on the best search terms to target for a web
page, it helps to google each term and quickly look through the
first 10 results. If your web page deliver similar information
as those 10, it is a relevant search term for the page. If not,
you may need to rewrite your content or target another term.
On the search results page, note also the number of competing
pages . This gives you an idea of how tough or easy it is for
you to achieve top ranking there.
Web Page Optimization
Web Page Title Optimization
The title is a very important element of your web page, because
it tells search engines what your page is about, and search engines
usually use it in search result listings. All search engines give
the web page title a lot of weight in deciding relevancy. So make
sure the page's most important keywords are included in the title.
Your title should be worded close to a readable sentence or phrase
of around 60 characters or less. Never just list keywords or repeat
them there, or you will very likely be considered spamming the
search engines, which may then blacklist your site.
Our Mergemill web templates include a field tag for the web page
title. It enables you to easily type in the title text in a merge-job
definition.
Content Text Optimization
Your title cannot stand alone. It must be supported by content
text that says exactly what the title is suggesting. Your content
text should be readable and logical, and include the important
search terms for the page. Write at least 200 words of visible
text for each page.
Meta Tag Optimization
Meta tags in web page HTML code were intended to help search
engines catalog web pages. They are invisible to viewers of your
web page. They have lost their significance now because many people
spammed the search engines by stuffing these tags with keywords.
Some search engines still consider the meta tags and they won't
do your web page any harm if properly used. The two tags that
may help your search engine rankings are meta keywords
and meta description.
For the meta keywords tag, you just list your keywords
separated by commas. Limit its length to less than 1000 characters.
This tag is the best place for you to add any common misspelling
of your keywords.
Some search engines display the text provided by the meta
description tag in search result listings. So besides working
your keywords into the description, you need to make it readable
and enticing. Text for this tag should not be longer than 250
characters.
Since different search engines accept different lengths of text
for these tags, it is essential that you place the important keywords
first.
Our Mergemill web templates include field tags that enable you
to easily insert text for these two meta tags.
When Your Web Pages Are Ready...
Find a reliable web hosting service provider to host your website.
Your great website cannot afford to be down frequently or for
any extended period of time if you want search engines to take
it seriously.
Submit your website address to search engines. Start with the
king and click
here for Google's submit page. For new sites without inbound
links, it usually takes several weeks before your site is visited
by search engine crawlers, and it will take further time before
your web pages are added to their index. Then you may see the
result of your SEO work, and proceed to improve your site and
the ranking of your web pages.
There is a shortcut to speed up this process. If you want your
site to be in the Google index within days, get a high-PageRank
site to link to you. Anyone with a PR 3 is a good start, and one
with 5 or above is almost certain to work.
Increase Link Popularity
Having other sites link to your web pages is critically important
in search engine optimization. All major search engines consider
link popularity a big factor in deciding the relevancy and ranking
of your web pages.
Though both quantity and quality of external links count, the
latter is more important. You may exchange reciprocal links with
other sites, but make sure you pick them wisely.
You will find that if your site is full of high-quality, valuable
and useful information, other sites will gradually pick that up
and link to your web pages without your asking.
One thing you must NOT do is to create a number of web sites
to fake a network of mutual links between them. You may end up
seeing all your sites disappear from search engine results.
There are websites or web pages that consist of nothing but links.
If they offer to link to you, don't bother. Instead of help, they
may dilute your relevancy. Focus on getting links from pages that
are considered the authority on the topic covered by your web
pages.
* PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of a web page.
To know the index of any web page, you need to add the free Google
toolbar to your browser window. It is available
here. Once you installed and turned on the PageRank Display
option, go to any web page and point your mouse to the PageRank
bar to check the numeric index.
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