Section Six: How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engine Traffic
While most people would suggest that you hire a professional for a task that seems to be rather difficult at first glance, in actuality there is nothing to search engine optimization, or SEO, that you cannot do yourself. It is much easier than designing your own website.
Far easier than finding resources to send traffic your way. And certainly easier than getting each and every person who visits your site to buy one of your products.
The easiest way to achieve search engine optimization is to make sure that you have some kind of informational keywords on every page of your site. From your home page to a product buried deep within your site that very few people outside of search engine spiders will ever view - everything needs to advertise your site to search engines. Sounds like a daunting task? Well, it is time consuming, but with a little practice, you will be well on your way to achieving a search engine optimized site.
Nobody, except for the original designers, really knows how each and every search engine works, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There are a few key aspects of search engine optimization, however, those are well documented and can help you get a higher rank in each and every search provider, from Google to Ask to Yahoo! The first step you need to take is to eliminate any duplicate content that you may have on your website.
This means that if you have two products that are exactly the same but differs in color or some other minute characteristic, and then put them on the same page. If you want a search engine optimized site, make sure that there is no duplicate content out there on your site. Having such content appear multiple times on a search engine is a great way to get your page rank lowered and lose quite a bit of natural search engine traffic.
The other search engine optimization technique that will yield you a much higher page rank is to make sure that everything on your site is maximized for your keyword selection. You should take full advantage of using Meta tags in your HTML such as the keyword tag and the description tag on every one of your pages. You can add in a huge amount of keywords, so make sure that you get every last one that corresponds to your business website.
Also, take advantage of the description and other tags associated with the images on your website; they are valuable places to introduce your keywords. And simply because you are focusing on the underlying aspects of your website that are only seen by search engines, don’t forget to place keywords inside of as much viewable text as you can. Doing so will really boost your search engine placement.
Finally, to rank higher in search engines, you need a variety of backlinks to your website. These are other sites that are linking to your website. Google and other search engines use this information to help determine the significance of a particular website, so go out there and see if you can entice some people to add a link to your site somewhere on their own. Keeping with this suggestion for search engine optimization, keep reading onto step five.
Section Seven: Finding Traffic in Unlikely Places
So you’ve now learned how to dig up traffic by advertising and through search engine optimization - but there are still two other ways which you can use to bring more people to your website. While they are a bit more unorthodox, they do work and can help you gain popularity in your chosen niche.
No matter what product you are selling, what program you are marketing, or how you are planning on making your money in the long term, these two methods can easily be used to drum up the traffic and the conversion rates that your website needs to survive.
The first way to find traffic in unlikely places is to contact webmasters of other sites and see if they are interested in sharing links with you. This will help you gain credibility with the search engines and acts as a “free” advertisement. Now, before you go off and ask really well known websites if they will trade links with you, you need to learn a few rules which are mostly common courtesy.
Firstly, do not even bother asking a site that is far more popular than yours to trade links with you. They won’t do it, so don’t even ask. If you are unsure of whether or not a site is more popular than yours, simply check the Alexa data for all websites or the Technorati data if you are exchanging links with a blog.
Secondly, mind your manners when you are asking to trade links with another webmaster. Think of this as a business deal and act accordingly. Do not use slang in your email to him or her, and use proper etiquette.
Also, explain what you are selling, why you want to exchange links with the webmaster you are corresponding with, and how you think it could benefit both of your sites. A clear and concise letter is often what can help seal the deal in a partnership such as this.
Another great, and mostly unused, way to drive traffic to your site is to offer an affiliate program. Affiliate programs are perfect for those of you with sales, retail, or marketing websites. You should fully take advantage of creating an affiliate program if your business website warrants it.
For those of you who are unaware, an affiliate program is simply a program that you run as a webmaster which allows other websites to link back to products on your website. If a person purchases a product from your website by using an affiliate’s link, the affiliate gets a small percentage of the purchase.
This type of program makes you happy because you got the money from the sale. It makes your affiliate happy because he or she got money for doing practically nothing aside from placing a link on his site. And it makes the customers happy because they ended up with the item they wanted.
While these are just two different ways to drive traffic to your business website, there are many more techniques which you should consider using. A quick search on your favorite search engine can turn up countless resources for information for those of you looking to establish your own online business.
Furthermore, it may be in your interest to check out some books relating to online businesses, search engine optimization, and some of the other topics discussed in this article. Good luck with your business.
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