To your surprise and dismay, hardly anyone is visiting your website. What can you do to increase your traffic? You know the basics of how Search Engines work. A user enters a query and a list of sites pops up. Except your site rarely comes up, or comes up close to the end of the hit list. So how does the Search engine determine the ordering of the list?
How Search Engines Work
Search Engines use “crawlers” or “spiders” — highly complex and sophisticated software “robots” that search the world wide web for the most frequently occurring words and links to other sites. Based on what they find, an index is built and used to match a query entered into a Search Engine with the indexed information on the sites to determine and then display the best matches. SEO takes all this into account and tries to improve your website’s positioning by including more of what the spiders look for — keywords and hyperlinks being two examples.
SEO Tips
SEO is not something you can fully learn from a single blog posting or technical article. It takes a lot of time and effort. Many find the process so complex they hire SEO consultants to help them A question you should be asking yourself is do I really need SEO? Is it worth the investment of time and possibly, money?
Suppose you have an informative website on dogs. You have devoted your life to the training and handling of dogs and you want to share that information. You’re not interested generating revenue — you’d prefer not to clutter your site with ads and you are not selling products or services. Why do you care how many visitors you get to your site? In this scenario, SEO is not for you. However, if your ego drives you to want to have the most-visited dog site on the web, or you have monetized your site, SEO can definitely help you.
Enter “SEO Tips” into your favorite Search Engine and you’ll get a hefty list of sites offering tutorials, tips and tricks, books on SEO, and listings of SEO Consultants. Take the time to start digging through the hit list. Skim or research the sites and dig into those that you find it easiest to understand. If you’re a novice, a discourse on the use of Boolean operators may not be what you need. After you’ve been through a few you should realize there are two practical tips you can use with little help from anybody.
The first is keywords. Make sure you have the keyword in the title of your website. Reuse the word in article headings and in the body of your content as frequently as it makes sense, but don’t overuse it. There are other keywords besides dog you can use. In your search you probably found Keyword Research tools, like Word Tracker, that can help you.
The second is links to other sites. You can look for other relevant sites and exchange links with them. An even better thing to do is to get “incoming Links” where a visitor ends up on your site by clicking a link from a referring site. There are a lot of “Directory” sites on the web that provide such referring links. Get yourself listed in one of these Directory Sites, if you can. Check out DMOZ as an example. We’ve only scratched the surface here.
For more information on search engine optimization or to talk to a search engine optimization company in Toronto, contact a specialist at Wolf21.com
