Some websites are made to benefit from traffic (visitors) coming from search engines. Other sites are made to serve specific communities or companies and are not made for high volumes of traffic from search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Some Basics

When you post a new website onto the Internet and submit it to the search engines you can expect to wait 3 to 6 months before it is properly indexed.

In search engine optimisation it is considered best practice to make each and every website search engine friendly from the start. This can be established in the initial site development discussions by agreeing that the site will be optimised for search engines.

Effective optimisation requires several factors to be balanced.

Firstly there is the content itself. This can be tailored to include specific keywords and phrases that the site owner wants to be found under by search engines.

Second is the page title which appears in the top left corner of the browser (above the File menu).

Third, the hidden meta tags that search engines use to evaluate websites.

There are different recommendations for how many words per page and how many times the keywords should appear per 100 words.

The principle is relevance. If your text is relevant to the subject in the page title and contains the right keywords and phrases it is more likely to rank highly.

Number of Words

A general guide is to create between 200 and 500 words of text per page that you want to be indexed and recognised by the search engines.

Keywords and key phrases can be researched before you develop new content.

Add New Content

Adding new material as you become aware of the different ways that people could access your content is an effective way of communicating to the search engine spiders that there is something happening on your site.

This also applies to your visitors who will be pleased when you keep adding relevant material to the site.

You may want to make adding new keyword targeted pages to your site a part of your site development strategy.

Target Specific Search Engines

Targeting search engines is an effective method of improving your search engine position and getting higher volumes of traffic.

Yahoo is an example of a popular search engine where an investment is required in order to gain priority consideration for listing.

Google lists you for free but you can also invest in their Adwords system.

The best site to be listed on is the Open Source Directory where all the entries are regulated by real people (in real time of course).

Pay per Click Advertising

Competing using Pay per Click can be effective and powerful if used against measurable returns on investment. What I mean by this is - you must be sure that when people click through to your site a decent percentage of them will proceed to make a purchase from you.

In other words, your conversion rate of clicks that you sponsor to the number of sales you make needs to be constantly monitored to make sure you are making effective use of your pay per click pounds and dollars.

A wise strategy is to set a test budget for a limited period and monitor that before committing larger amounts of resources.

Exchange Links

Link exchanges are famously a sure method of improving your site ranking with most search engines. Link exchanges are particularly valuable when they are between sites that have some relevance to each other. Also if you link your sites to other ranked sites and get links from higher ranked sites your own ranking will improve.

Make it Last

Longevity, the amount of time a site is online can have a strong influence on page ranking. This is particularly true if the page in question performs a definitive role for the subject under review or research.

The principle here is that its better to get your site up sooner rather than later so you have staked your claim on your piece of cyber-space.

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