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Internet Traffic and Search
engine optimization Techniques
You might be wandering the reasons your web site is not getting much
internet traffic. After all your web site took lots of financial and
human resources, but unfortunately like so many web sites, it is quite
unknown and as a result it does not get enough internet traffic to
make it financially viable. Did you know that about 80 percent of all
web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true!
Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the
attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any
web site internet promotion. And the good news about this is that
improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for
free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. There
are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some
are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization
techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other
words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a
friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have
to use to obtain a better position in search engine's pages, when
searching for specific keywords, related to services or products
offered by a web site. Search engine optimization steps for a web
page:
Title:
The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the
most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products
or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than
60 characters.
Keywords:
The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which
best represents the products or services offered by the web page.
Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not
contain more than 250 characters.
Description:
The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which
will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords
phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It
should not contain more than 200 characters.
Keywords in Headings:
Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines
as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should
be looked for and indexed by the search engines.
Web page text:
It is a good practice to include informative text one every page,
using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain
more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html
Body section of the web page.
Keywords in Alt Tags:
Every html picture "img" tag should contain an ALT tag with an
appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when
appropriate.
Keywords in Anchor Tags:
Every html hypertext link "a href " should contain a TITLE tag with an
appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when
appropriate.
Robots.txt file:
Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This
is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search
engine´s crawler when indexing a web site.
There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web
pages indexed. This way thru the use of robots.txt, one will have
control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the
search engines.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /data/
HTML code validation:
Search engine's crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages
with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search
engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended
for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.
Links:
Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and
whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating
the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page
ranks are a plus.
Registering with Directories and Search Engines:
It is very important the registration of a website with directories
and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that
your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory
registration. Search engine optimization has become a very important
set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to
search engines. To obtain an increase in internet traffic will take
some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion
too. But anybody in need of higher internet traffic, free search
engine optimization might be considered his first option. Roberto
Sedycias IT Consultant This article is under GNU FDL license and can
be distributed without any previous authorization from the author.
However the author's name and all the URL´s (links) mentioned in the
article and biography must be kept.
The 3 Best
Website Traffic Sources
Not a day goes by that any serious website owner doesn't wonder how to
get more traffic to their site. This intense desire to generate more
clicks makes virtually any online entrepreneur easy prey to many of
the traffic schemes and scams that pervade the Internet like conmen on
a carnival midway. Promises of fast traffic and big bucks often
separate even the most savvy business person from their money because
they want to believe the promises made by these traffic hucksters.
However, rather than thinking "complicated equals better" in the
traffic game, the best website traffic sources rate extremely easy to
separate from the useless garbage traffic. Fact: "Good Traffic" equals
"Targeted Traffic!" That means the visitors come as a result of desire
to find out more on a specific, niche topic, not as a result of "exit"
traffic or membership in a "safe" list where members simply pitch each
other in an incestuous spam fest. Good traffic comes from people
clicking links on topics targeted to their interests and getting
directed to a website containing information they want and expect as a
result of clicking the link. Bottom line, when you get right down to
it, the best, most dependable sources of targeted traffic come from
links that people click. So, next time you're considering spending
money on a traffic source, understand that unless it involves a
targeted link that a targeted visitor can click to get to your
website, think twice before opening up your wallet. To my knowledge,
only three ways exist to get a link to your site: buy it, "voodoo" it,
or grow it. ** Buy Links ** Buying links actually rates the fastest
way to get traffic to your website. You simply sign up for Google
AdWords at Google.com or you open an account with Overture.com. You
then run ads with a link on those sites and any time someone clicks
the link, you pay for the click through a relatively straightforward
bidding process based on the popularity of the keyword. You can also
buy links in ezines, newsletters, and on other people's website either
on a per-click basis, for a period of time (a week or month), or in
exchange for paying them a commission if a sale gets made as a result
of a click on the link.
** Linking "VoodDoo" ** Linking "voodoo" refers to attempting to
manipulate the search engines into displaying links to your website.
You can find a large number of automated software programs online at
any given time that will claim to help you get more search engine
traffic. Depending on the intensity of competition in a specific
market and the fact that search engines change their rules frequently,
pursuing search engine links this way can quickly turn into the online
equivalent of Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole. ** Grow Links **
I personally prefer this method to get links to my websites: growing
them. The best type of link to get involves one person telling another
person, either explicitly or implicitly, they should click the link
and visit the site at the other end. One way to do this is simply to
exchange links with another site which targets the same audience as
your site. You can manage this process manually or use one of the many
software packages that will mange the process for you. A search on
Google.com for "reciprocal link manager software" yields a good start.
The easiest way to grow a link is through using articles other people
post on their websites which link back to your website. The reason
articles work so well for "growing" links involves the numerous ways
in which articles get distributed online, each of which can create
dozens, hundreds, even thousands of different links back to your
website by publishing a single article. In fact, the following
represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the places
you can grow links by publishing articles online. ~ Blogs - Your
articles can not only appear on your own blog, but get posted by
others on their blogs with surprising ease. The links in these
articles can point directly back to your website. ~ Article
Directories - Article directories such as IdeaMarketers.com abound
online. They not only provide an easy way to display your articles to
allow others to pick them up for posting on their websites, but also
in and of themselves attract readers searching for content. ~ OPS
(Other People's Sites) - Popular websites like WebProNews.com attract
repeat visitors by offering targeted content to their readers. Since
they can't produce all the content themselves, they publish articles
created by others. Links from these sites can bring a steady stream of
targeted visitors by giving you targeted exposure. ~ Ezines - By
getting your articles published in other people's ezines, you can get
a link on the most valuable real estate online, a targeted prospect's
email "inbox." Many ezine publishers run articles written by others to
their targeted readers, and your link in the resource box can bring
you a veritable avalanche of targeted site visitors when hundreds,
even thousands of people receive your article at the same time.
Whether you choose to buy them, "voodoo" them, or grow them, getting
targeted links to your site posted on the Internet represents the
absolute best way to get steady traffic to your site. Though not as
fast as buying them or as exciting as trying to manipulate the search
engines, growing links with articles gives you a long-term, dependable
presence online.
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