How to Increase Website Traffic by using SEO
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While I am working on the launch plan for my project, it seems appropriate to start a series of articles on this existential question about the Internet: how to create traffic on your website? My goal is not to write tutorials - there are many - but rather to introduce the levers I have used in the past and offer a feedback on my experiments. I plan to cover the following levers (not necessarily in this order): search engine optimization, paid listing, shopping comparison sites, affiliation, advertisement, e-mailing, cash back, private sales and partnerships. The honor to begin this series goes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is the set of methods and tools used to get listed in the initial results of the main search-engines based on keywords that are related to your goals. If your activity is selling flowers online, ending up at the top of the results from a Google search on "buy flowers" shouldn't be bad for your business. Natural traffic can form more than 25% of the total traffic on your website. We can single out three dimensions to search engine optimization.
The first one is technical. It consists of defining the parameters in the robots.txt file, optimizing the folders' classification tree, optimizing as well the naming of both folders and files (pages, images, sounds...) and urls, making sure that the hierarchy of editorial content is using appropriate HTML markup (for instance, making sure that the pages' title is formatted with the H1 tag), etc.
The second one is editorial. You must write for your readers...keeping in mind that those search-engines "read" you too. (We also find two messengers here). It consists of optimizing the content of your site, mainly texts, with the keywords that matter to you. By optimization, we mean sound repetition of terms, positioning near the BODY tag, positioning in titles, accentuation, etc.
The final one is reputation. On the Internet, it is measured by the number of links to your page. To make it easier, if these links come from well-known pages in the domain covered by your page, it will benefit from a helping hand in the competition for the first places. (Notice that links to other pages have an impact, but much less significant). As we see, parameters are many - more than two hundred in Google and their weight is unknown and shifting. Indeed, search-engines modify their algorithm as the Web evolves. Therefore, even if some good practices always remain, optimizing a website is a never-ending task.
I worked for a few years in a company that specialized in search engine optimization for websites. Let us say that I remain skeptical on the seriousness of most of the professionals there, and the most renowned ones are no exception. If I had to
provide recommendations to someone who wants to optimize his site, it would be the following: First of all, do use freelances: less costly than agencies, and more competent, Anyway, I would ask about their customers and would verify the results they obtained. If you are at the design phase, there is no better time to optimise your site. At that stage, the technical solutions are easy to implement; later, it becomes an issue. If it is not the case, the first thing to do in my opinion is to define the list of crucial key words for your activity and to measure their performances. Next, I would negotiate a result-commitment with professionals. I think it is absurd that the profession only takes into account the service provision. A performance element should be introduced, the criteria being the result page and the positions' persistence. There is nothing easier to measure. Tools such as AgentWebRanking have been doing it for years. Then, I would use a Web Analytics tool to make sure that the visits engendered by these key words lead to the expected performances.
In conclusion, if search engines are a dominant force today, they have several challenges to take up. Thus, social networks such as Facebook or MySpace which cannot be indexed while people spend an increasing amount of time on them; Web 2.0 technologies (Ajax...) which reconsider the Web page concept; the rise to power of live Web (of which Twitter is the leading figure) which renders the logic of deferred indexation often impertinent; etc. These elements invite you not to solely rely on search-engines for the promotion of your services.
Post scriptum
Some resources for those who want to go into more details:
The Wikipedia page Words from Google itself on its site and in this document The excellent site SEOmoz which offers a blog and many tools This exceptional page where the best experts discuss and evaluate the influential criteria Search Engine Roundtable a blog which offers a good perspective on this microcosm