Reposted from:
10 Ways to Promote Your Website
How do you get visitors to your website? What do you do to get increased traffic? Here’s a list of 10 items you need to consider. You may be doing many of these already. Others you meant to do and forgot about. Still others you’ve never heard of.
While I’m not breaking any new ground here, I’ve tried to summarize some of the most important techniques.
Search Engine Strategies
Perhaps the most important, and inexpensive strategy to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines is “natural” or also known as “organic” searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send “spiders” to index the content of your web site. Let’s begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing. The idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what your webpage is about. This approach is called “search engine optimization” or SEO.
1. Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page. make it rich in keywords that you want people to find your site with. Remove as many “filler” words from the title such as “the,” “and,” etc. as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the tags, in this format: 10 Ways to Promote Your Website. (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.) Also keep in mind that not all of your readers have English as a fist language.
Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in Plastic Widgets and that’s what people will be searching for, don’t just use your company name “ACME, Inc.,” use “Plastic Widgets - ACME, Inc.” The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called “keyword prominence”). Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more that people see which interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.
2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. Don’t include keywords that don’t appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the tags, in this format:
The maximum number of characters should be about 200. Just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.
When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1 above). Then I write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the description META tag.
Next, I strip out the common words, leaving just the main keywords and phrases and then insert those into the keywords META tag. It’s no longer used much for ranking, but I’m leaving it in anyway. I think it may have some minor value. So to summarize so far, every webpage in your site should have a distinct title and META description tag. If you implement these two points, you’re well on your way to better search engine ranking. But there’s more that will help your ranking….
3. Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don’t expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines, it won’t. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That’s a big mistake. Make sure you use these tag names rather than creating headline tags with other names.)
4. Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document. Where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don’t want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don’t overdo it.
5. Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags. This helps your site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors and gives additional clues to the search engines. The ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search.
6. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your page. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as plastic-widget.htm . It is another clue for the search engine.
7. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site, right? JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don’t read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don’t set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.
Some content management systems and e-commerce catalogs produce dynamic, on-the-fly webpages using PHP or ASP. These are often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go farther. If you find the search engines aren’t indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions. For Wordpress blogs, I use ” All in One SEO” as an automated URL rewriter.
8. Create a Site Map XML file. A site map page with links to all your pages can help search engines find all your pages, particularly if you have a larger site. Upload your sitemap.xml to your website. Then submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, following instructions on their sites. Be sure to set up a free account and explore what they have to offer.
9. Develop Seperate Webpages Focused on Each Your Target Keywords. SEO specialists no longer recommend using external doorway or gateway pages, since nearly duplicate webpages might get you penalized. Rather, develop several webpages on your site, each of which is focused on a target keyword or keyphrase for which you would like a high ranking.
10. Promote Your Video and Image Content. Google displays not only webpage content, but also often displays listings for images and videos. Therefore, consider creating such content appropriate to your business and then optimizing it so it can be ranked high enough to help you. For example, if you were to get a top-ranking, informative video on YouTube that mentions your site, it could drive a lot of traffic to your site.
I hope this list helped some. I intend to expand this list soon with other strategies, such as Social Media.
Feel free to throw some of your ideas into the comments.
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