Let The Search Engines Bring Your Business Traffic By Optimizing Your Website
Does the term "search engine optimization" scare you? Do you think this is beyond your capability so you just hope that your pay per click advertising will produce profits before you go broke? The search engines can produce a lot of traffic for your business 24/7 and free of charge. It only takes a few simple steps to add code to your html and a couple of concepts written in your text to achieve a search engine friendly website.
The search engines use a robot to crawl your site. If the robot can crawl your entire site, the search engine has more information about your site. To accomplish this only takes adding a couple lines of code to html to fully define your site. There has been discussion on whether some of the major search engines use this information but I have seen my Meta Descriptions show up on Google.
Within the "head" section of your html are areas of information that can be added to define your site to the search engines. I have done this with my sites in the following way:
1. <head>
2. <title> "Your Site Name" </title>
3. <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
4. <meta name="description" content="Your Site Description">
5. <meta name="keywords" content="your keyword, your keyword">
6. </head>
Website Title Included in the head section should not include any "stop" words. Stop words are "the," "and," "your," "it," and the like and symbols that represent any of these words such as "&."
Meta Description Tag Included in the head section is a "one-liner that describes what your site is offering and how it will benefit the viewer.
Meta Keyword Tag Included in the head section is a listing of your keywords. The most common keywords are not usually the best keywords. Your keywords should be phrases of 3-4 words and more specific to your sites content. For example, if your site is selling furniture the keyword "furniture" will not define the type of furniture you are selling. With keywords like this you get more browsers vs buyers. Something like "used mahogany office furniture" describes more about what your are selling and shows up on a specific search by a viewer. Here you are using keywords to accommodate a viewers search and you generally get more buyers vs browsers.
Once you have the html in place write your body of text. The theme of your site should be carried through all pages of your site and be rich with keywords from your Meta Keyword Tag. Search Engines use density (how often a keyword or phrase occurs) and weight (how often a keyword or phrase is used in relation to total words on a page) to measure a keywords importance to the page. Keywords or phrases either underlined or in bold also add to the weight of a keyword.
All the pages of your site should be linked together to allow the robot to crawl all pages of your site. This is easily accomplished by putting a menu on the top or bottom of each page referencing the other pages on the site. This allows the robot to "spider" your site. Broken links both internal and external can stop a robot from crawling your site and reading all your information. Make sure that all your links are valid.
This is the basic search engine optimization setup for a website that I use to get free traffic. There is more information available on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Keywords at Information Online Center-Home Based Business Information Center. These programs offer more methods of search engine optimization, keywords and their power and page rank techniques.
About the Author
I've been online since January 2007 researching home based businesses, methods of promoting that business and sources of website traffic that are free. All can be viewed at Information Online Center-Home Based Business Information Center. As I find new information and new ways to improve any or all of the above I share it so we all have a chance to succeed online.
