A Guide to SEO For Newbies
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Google and other search engines are the gateway to your business, and getting high page ranks somewhere in the first page of listings, is important for driving business to your site. There are companies out there that will promise you the moon, the stars, and, by the way, page rankings so high that you’ll cheerfully pay them hundreds of dollars every month for their services.
Finding tried and true ways to get organic traffic meaning being found during a regular search, not by pay per click ads as seem on the right column of the listing, is the best and most solid way to build your web site’s traffic long term. Here’s what search engine optimization boils down to:
1. Content is King. You need real content on your web site; this is content that has real meaning to real people, not just keyword stuffing. Search engines send out programs called web crawlers or web spiders that index web sites. The number one thing those web crawlers are looking for is content. They determine if a web site has content by tracking keyword phrases. This is why search engine optimization usually starts by picking keywords and writing content around them; a lot of web site marketing gurus advocate keyword stuffing well past the point of sanity and effectiveness. Anything more than about 2-4% of the words in an article and the web sites will filter it out it’s too obviously “gaming the system”.
2. Links back to your site from other’s sites provide validation. The more links particularly links that relate to your site’s content, the higher your page ranking will be. Methods to get link backs range from link exchanges with other websites in related topics, to writing articles about the topic you’re dealing with, to social bookmarking sites and such.
3. Updated and fresh content. This is important both for your human visitors as well as the web spiders. When both see there’s new content added at least 3 times a week, they will be more likely to come back more often. It takes an average of seven visits before someone will purchase a product or post on a forum, so it’s important to give both reason to return to your site.
4. Navigational links that are clear and make sense from your main home page. There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to find what you are looking for easily, most visitors will leave quickly if it’s seems too confusing to find what they are looking for.
5. Text means everything in web content. Search engine crawlers ignore Javascript, they disregard graphics, and until recently, they couldn’t read text in Flash animations. If the search engine spiders can’t read it, it doesn’t help your page rankings.
The real secret of long term success in search optimization is to make your web site as usable as you can. Make it easy to navigate for real people, who want to read about your niche, and with content that makes them come back.
