Search engines are the single most popular way to get new visitors to your website. They also bring in seven per cent of website visitors. All of that means that you have to take pretty good notice of generating search engine traffic if you want to make serious success of your e-commerce site.
You don’t need to know too much about website building to make a success of it, though. There are many software packages that allow even a complete beginner to write very good static pages in HTML. This is the most effective way to get search engines to notice you.
Even a short time spentpromoting your commercial website to the most well known search engines will be likely to generate a lot of traffic. Google is the most commonly used search engine in the UK, but Yahoo! And MSN run it a close second and third.
In building your commercial website you need to be aware that most people browsing the internet will only look at one or two pages on the search engine results, so to get noticed, your website needs to be in the Top 20 for these search engines, to be noticed and get significant traffic.
So, with that in mind, here is how to get your website – or at least its homepage – into the top twenty results on the search engines.
- Select a couple or three keyword phrases that you know that people are using to browse for when they look for the kind of product or service that you offer. You should make your keyword term specific, so that not too many results are returned that you need to compete with for front page rankings. You should also use terms rather than single keywords. You can test out the popularity of your search terms by searching for them on Google and finding out how many websites are listed.
- It is also important not to try to include too many keyword phrases on each page. You can always write more pages for other keyword phrases. You could take a look at what keywords competitors’ websites are targeting. It isn’t necessarily a good idea to use all the same keyword phrases but at least they will give you some guidance.
- Each page of your website should have a header section. You need to put meta descriptions in these headers and ensure that they are written using your targeted keyword phrases.
- Your tags for each website page should be of approximately 7-8 words. They should include the keywords you are targeting in that particular web page. For example, on a website called ‘JayBee Journo’ a meta tag for the keyword phrase ‘ copyrighting services’ may be set up accordingly:
<head>
<title>JayBeeJourno: </title>
<meta name=”description” content=”copyrighting services, for all your writing needs” / >
<meta name=”keywords” content=copywriting services, writing” / >
</head>
- You should make sure that all the keyword phrases that you use appear naturally in page text, an they should appear at least four times per page, with the first occurrence being near the beginning.
- Include your keyword phrases in the Alt text which is attached to the images in your website, such as:
<img src=”writing.gif” alt=” copyrighting services, writing ” / >
- You should actively build one-way and reciprocal links to relevant, high-ranking sites, which will boost your website’s search engine rankings.
- Never try to sneak in your keyword phrases in white text or tiny letters hoping they won’t be seen because you hope search engines will be more likely to find you. Most major search engines will penalize you for this black hat tactic and they will rank you lower and may even ban your website from their search engine listings.
- Never use frames because these are difficult for search engine spiders to crawl and to recognize. Even if you have great content with expert use of SEO< you won’t be ranked highly this way.
- Your website pages should always be manually submitted your pages to search engines. Here are a list of the main ones, but be aware that you have to pay to list your website on some search engines.
-
- AltaVista
- Ask.com
- GoTo
- HotBot
- Looksmart
- MSN
- Open Directory (http://dmoz.org/)
- Yahoo
There are several free services through which you can see your website’s rankings. You can find these by entering ‘free position checker’ into a search engine.
There is just as much art in search engine optimisation as there is science. Nothing is guaranteed and it can involve trial and error. However frustrating they are, you need to take good notice of search engine rankings.
Hi,
Nice article on seo but pretty short..
Nyway thanks!!
Comment by Neha — April 8, 2009 @ 12:13