Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

These tutorials will explain the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the success of your website.

When I look at the stats from my website, it's clear that the number one factor that impacts traffic to my websites, is the work I do on search engine optimization. That means that my site is getting high up in the search engine results and it beats out any other form of traffic building I do because search engine traffic is free.

Any time someone finds my web sites by entering a few search terms in Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine, that traffic is free to me. I didn't have to pay anything to get found. That's a huge benefit, especially for someone trying to make money online with a website.

In the diagram below, the list of referrers to one of my websites for the first few days of the month illustrates how valuable search engine optimization is.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the most popular search engines and it's clear from this chart that all three of them are finding my website.

Notice that the top seven referrers of traffic to the website are search engines. And of the search engines, Google is responsible for 71% of the page views for this time period. Know that after the top twenty or so referrers, the number of page views drops off significantly.

 

 

See the table below for the relative differences between search engine traffic.

Search Engine	Percent of Page Views
Google	71%
Google images	14%
Bing	11%
Yahoo	4%

 

Note also that people are finding my website through searches for images. This is an often overlooked strategy for search engine optimization, but correctly naming and labeling images with "alt" tags on your website can increase your traffic too..

And the best thing about this traffic is that it was FREE! & It was targeted to the content on my website.

Remember people found my site in the search engines by entering search terms for which they were interested in getting information. The search engines targeted their interest toward my website. They were already looking for the information and the search engines returned my website in the search engine results page.

This is great traffic because its targeted traffic from people who were looking for the information that I'm providing on my site. These are targeted visitors.

IMPORTANT: Targeted traffic is MUCH more valuable than random traffic who stumbled upon your site.

Search Engine Rankings

Getting a good ranking in the search engines is far more difficult now than it was ten years ago. They engines have gotten a lot smarter and they're much more picky about the quality of the results they are displaying to back to users when they conduct a search.

It used to be that stuffing a few key word on the page and in the meta tags would get you a good ranking, but not anymore.

Meta tags are the hidden information about your website. They include things like a description of your page, the keywords used in the content, the title of your page etc. Except for the page title, you don't see most of this information when a page displays, but the search engines see all of this text and use it to help determine your page rank.

Now days, getting a good ranking in the search engines is more about the popularity of your website than it is the information in the Meta tags.

By popularity contest, I mean, how many individuals or other websites think the content on your site is good enough to include a link to it. The search engines value incoming links to your website.

These are called back links. That's when another website links to your homepage or to some other page within your website. They value a one-way link even more. That means that there is a one way link from another website to yours without you linking back to the first website. That is how link exchange programs work…where one website says to another, I'll put a link to your website on my site if you'll do the same for my.

The search engines recognize that and don't place much value on it because they know it's creating an artificial environment that really doesn't have much to do with the quality of your website.

Search engines recognize that if a web site has a lot of back links to it, it must be because many other websites or the webmasters that control them, think that your website is pretty good one.

One of the best ways for you to build traffic to your website is to get a lot of backlinks from other sites. How do you do that?...You create a great quality site that everyone will want to link to.

Also see articles on Internet Link Building, Link Building and Keyword Optimization.

Getting Good Back Links

So what does that look like in practice. First of all, you need to pay attention to the Meta tags that you include in your webpage. This information is in the header section of the page. Here's what you should have at a minimum:

• Page Title - A short descriptive page title that includes the main keyword upon which the page is focused.
• Description - A one or two sentence description of what the visitor will find on the page.
• Keywords - one, two, or three keywords or phrases that form the theme of the page.

When you write the content for the page, it should be done in as natural a way as possible without appearing to stuff keywords in the page. Having said that you're writing for two audiences, your visitor and the search engines.

You should try to write a fluidly as possible so it reads well to the human visitor, but you should also try to include keywords where they are appropriate. Keywords should make up somewhere between 3 to 6% of the words on your page, but they must fit naturally into the flow of the writing.

This is how you build a great site full of useful content. Then if you market it appropriately, as other webmasters with related content find your site, they will add links to your site on theirs.

Here's how it worked on my Old Woodworking Tools site. As other woodworking organizations and tool sites recognized the value of my content, they began placing links to it on their sites. That's what Google values most in page ranking... how many other related sites link to this site. Google measures that and the higher number of back links, the more Google thinks of your site and the higher will be your page ranking.

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