Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

How to Increase Web Traffic

Monday, November 9th, 2009

If you want to get high quality website traffic then you need to use off page SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. To generate a continuous steam of web traffic to your website you need to create link building strategies.

To get a very large amount of website traffic you will need to have your website ranked on the first pages of search engine results pages (SERPs). To achieve this you need to have a high quality website that has unique content with keywords relating to your websites topic. It is imperative to have key phrases and well written content is useful and no copied. Having these things will encourage a continuous flow of traffic to your website. By having a website that generates interest, other websites will link to it and the chances are that those linking to your article will have a website of a similar topic. High quality back links such as these will push your website up SERPs.

If you have written a web page and it is no appearing on the first few pages on search engines for the keywords of your choice then the chance of getting large traffic numbers decreases dramatically. When a user searches for something on the Internet it is unlikely that they will check past the third page of results so you should make it your gaol to be in this section.

After creating a unique article with keywords and good SEO techniques you should strive to gain back links of a high quality. These back links to your website should not just be to your homepage; they should also be to deep internal pages. This can be achieved by writing genuine useful comments on blogs and forums with a link back to your site. You can submit your website to web directories that are free and paid ones if you wish. You may also want to take advantage of Google Adwords.

As the number of visitors increases and you first start to see traffic you need to do everything in your power to keep them coming back to your website. This will then provide constant traffic to your website and increase the popularity of your website. It is logical to only carry out free techniques to increase traffic at first until you have some revenue to invest in paid methods.

What is Organic Traffic?

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Web traffic that comes to your website either via a web directory or search engine that is free and unpaid is commonly known as organic traffic. You can gain large amounts of organic traffic by listing your website on directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo or by submitting your website to search engines such as Google.

One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to register with major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. In most cases it is not enough just to register with these websites. By registering you are asking the search engine for your website to be included for crawling. This involves the search engine gathering data about your website. Search engine crawling programs are generally called bots, robots or spiders.

The crawl will begin with your websites homepage and then progress through your linked website structure. The crawl will following internal links around your website and gather data about the pages that it finds and then index this information in the search engines database. The search engine will index the web page URL and the web page title and some include more information such as a page description and parts of the pages content.

When a user searches for a phrase the search engine will match this phrase with indexed pages and show them as results. The order in which the results are displayed is usually dependant on the search engines algorithm. It is more common that organic search results are displayed higher are receive more clicks from users. This is why it is important to get your website ranked high on SERPs.

Web crawlers can take a long time to index pages due to the vast number that are on the web. With more and more websites being created everyday the spiders workload continues to grow hence the time it takes for your website to be indexed on a search engine. Using a service like Google Adwords you can decrease the waiting time it takes for your website to become indexed.

What is Link Popularity?

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Link popularity is based upon the quantity of high quality back links from similar websites. If an incoming link to your website has relevant keywords in the anchor text on the external website, this may well help your web page gain a higher ranking. Link popularity is a very important part of search engine optimization which can really improve your websites ranking in SERPs.

Link building is an Off page SEO technique used to increase the number of websites linking to your web pages. The link popularity of a website is dependent on a few factors. These are listed below:

  • The number of websites that are linking to your website
  • The Link popularity and the PageRank of the external website linking to you
  • The page from which you are getting the link should not have too many outgoing links
  • The content and niche of the website link to you should be similar to yours
  • The link to your website should be one way which means there is no link back to the external website from your web page (no reciprocal link).
  • The external web page should have a higher rank than your website
  • The website linking to you should not be blacklisted
  • The IP addresses of the website linking to you
  • The anchor text in the link to you should contain one of your websites top keywords
  • The link coming to you should be a simple link with no scripting

There are other factors too that affect link popularity however the ones listed above should give you a basis on which to gain back links.

Matt Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags

Monday, December 8th, 2008

On Page SEO

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

A website that looks amazing and has the best interactivity or product is not much use if no one knows that website exists. One of the biggest sources of traffic is search engines so optimizing your website to appear higher than other sites with similar content can be no bad thing.

Where to start?

The first thing to do is to optimize the website itself. On page SEO is a way of making sure that your website is “search engine friendly”. This basically means making it easier for search engines to find and crawl.

  1. The first thing to do is to ensure that every page on your website is visible to a search engine. Do this by checking that there is a link to that page somewhere on your website. If there is no link to that page it will be a lot harder to find, if at all.
  2. You need to use heading tags. On pages of your website insert the <h1> tag etc for page titles and sub titles to suit.
  3. On all pages of your website, check that there is unique content.
  4. Use your meta tags on every page and ensure that you use them well. Take advantage of title, description and keyword meta data. Change them for every page of your website and try to keep the information in them to the point.
  5. Help search engine visitors too by using a format they understand for your links. For example use URLs such as yoursite.com/your-product-name.php instead of its product ID in the address.
  6. If you have links going to a page about a specific topic, then label the link respectively by putting “your page content” as the link the user will click.
  7. Valid HTML is very important, so ensure that your code is. If you coding is really poor then this may result in your site not being indexed properly. You can check your sites code here.
  8. Use the re=”nofollow” attribute for websites that you are unsure about. If you are skeptical about a site, then why help it rank higher in search engines? It could be a competitor of yours using your sites content that won’t be dissimilar to their websites and as a result helping their PR.

Images

  1. Use images to your advantage as well. Name images appropriately such as iukhost-screenshot.jpg. This increases the chance of it being placed on sites such as Google Images.
  2. Images can make a page look great, however if they are not working then you want an alternative to show, so use alt tags. These provide an alternative text instead of the image. Again make sure that this is relevant such as “iUKHost Screenshot”.

Off Page SEO

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Off page search engine optimization involves things that you can do off your website to help improve its search engine rank. Like increasing PageRank, off page SEO is about creating more links to your website.

Back links

You can go out and get lots of irrelevant back links to your site, however this will not help you very much. You need to get back links to your website, from websites that have similar content and preferably from a page that has a high Page Rank.

You need to get links to your website from websites that are trusted and do not spam or have duplicate content. You need to check if the website has content that is of good quality and is relevant to your site. You should check what type of out-going links the page your link will be on has and ensure that these are of a good quality.

Different types of websites have different types of traffic. You don’t want visitors that are just visiting your site for a second and then leaving. You need quality visitors to your website who are looking for the type of content that your website offers.

You should look for sites that have the do follow attribute because these are the ones that will benefit you the most.

Make the most of alt tags if you are placing an image advert by including keywords relevant to your website. The same applies to a text advert so include keywords that are relevant to your website in the anchor text.

How to Increase PageRank?

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

What is my current PageRank?

Before going any further you first need to know what your current PageRank is and to find this out you need to install the Google toolbar. This gives the official PageRank of your website. Download Here!

When does PageRank Change?

Google Update PageRank only a few times a year which gives you time to work on improving it. To key to getting a higher PageRank is to have back links to your website from other websites that have similar content that also receive high traffic.

There are tools on the web after working to increase your PageRank that you can use to roughly guess what your next PR will be. However these are not always accurate. Try one out here.

Comment on Blogs

If you have a blog and want to increase the PR, try commenting on other blogs that are similar to yours. This will create back links to your website from similar content.

Directories

Other steps are to submit your website to online directories. These are free and offer a range of link types so ensure that you choose regular link. Do not just put your links on a couple you need thousands however build these links over a period of time and do not get them all at the same time because this may harm your PageRank.

Articles

Submit articles on topics relating to your website and include links to your website within the article.

It becomes harder to get a higher rank as you move up through PageRank.

What Is PageRank?

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

PageRank is a technology created at Stanford University by Larry Page, co-founder of Google. PageRank is used to determine the importance of a web page. This is one of the things that is used decide which pages appear in search engine results.

How does it Work?

PageRank works by deciding that pages with a higher number of links going to them are the more important. As a result they are listed further up search results. There is another factor to PageRank and this is that it is not only the amount of links that is taken into consideration.

PageRank also analyses the web page on which the link to the website is placed. This is why it is important to get back links to your website, from websites that have related content to you.

PageRank is ultimately designed to find websites that appear to be the best source of information to the user. By looking at the number of incoming links to a web page, PageRank states that this page is therefore useful.

Webmasters can manipulate PageRank in their favour by trying to force more links to their web pages. Too many incoming links from websites that are unrelated to your content may damage your websites PageRank.

How do I check my websites PageRank?

The most accurate way to check your websites PageRank is by using the Google Toolbar. A websites PageRank is measured between PR0 and PR10. There is a very small number of websites with PageRank 10. Each page on a website has a PageRank, not just the website as a whole.