Tips for Easily Creating Websites

Everything You Need to Know to Run a Successful Website

May 27 2009

Search Engine Optimization – Better and Faster Search Engine Placement

Posted by Spyros Panagiotopoulos in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), tags: drive traffic, search engine indexing, search engine optimization, seo, website traffic

None of us has ever started creating a website and had traffic knocking on his door too soon. The bad reality is that in order to get traffic on your website, you really have to work for it. The first thing to understand is where does the traffic really come from.

Traffic generally occurs in 3 different ways:

Search Engines
Referring Sites
Direct Hits

As you can probably understand, when you are beginning with your website you can have no Direct Hits and that is because nobody knows about you. You may be having the best website about your niche, but in order for people to directly come to your site, you already have to be an established authority at your topic.

Referring Sites are websites that somehow link to you. Of course, when you begin, you can’t really have referring websites link to you and therefore you cannot get much traffic out of that.

Therefore, it seems that we need to rely on search engines. Typically, search engines are the best visit source for every website of the world and this is pretty logical. Think about it for a second. Suppose that you wish to find a website about table tennis. What would you do? Easy, you fire up google or yahoo and write “table tennis” at their search prompts. Lots of search results are shown to you and you most times click on one of the top three and open a table tennis related website(hopefully).

What would happen if your website was listed at the top results of such a query? You would get very many hits each day for sure. More hits means more traffic and the latter means more ways to monetize your website. Therefore, a better search engine placement should be the TOP priority of a new webmaster’s website.

How do i get my site to show on the first page of search engine results?

I want to be totally sincere to you, this is a very difficult task but if you manage to do it for important keywords, you’re really winning the game. Before starting to tell you important things about optimizing your site for search engines, i have to stress out what you need in order to get better search engine placement:

You need to have content that applies to a keyword search.
You need to overpower your competitors.
You need to have a popular website.
You need to be patient and let time play its role.

Let me thoroughly explain what i mean. First of all, in order to be found at search engines, you need to have QUALITY CONTENT. I cannot really stress that enough. It’s the most important thing you should have. However, content alone is not enough, you need to write about things that people want to learn about AND the answers are not already given. You need to have to say something unique. Suppose that you’re writing a blog about football. There are hundreds of websites about football online and some of them are pretty established on the search engines and are considered authority and the search engines ASK THE AUTHORITIES.

The internet is very dynamic and more content is published everyday. You may have a post of yours at the first page of google one day and the other day have it on page 5 of the search results. Don’t be disappointed. That’s the way it works. Continue to build on such content and you’ll get consistently better placement.

You need to understand that search engines prefer established and popular websites for their top search engine results and this is not shocking at all. After all, if you were to ask somebody about basketball, would you ask James Lebron or a rookie NCAA player? In the eyes of the search engines, you are the latter. The good news is that even Lebron was a rookie sometime.

The key to better search engine results is the popularity of your website AND the time it actively exists online. Older websites tend to be preferred because their long time internet appearance implies their credibility on the topic they talk about. However, the amount of people that visit a website directly has an impact on the search engines and is the most important thing and as time passes, you certainly will get much better search engines ranking.

What are the techniques for better search engine placement?

To be sincere, this could easily be the subject of a whole book. However, there are some key points that if you learn about and use at your website you will certainly get ranked in a short period of time, provided that you create content of course.
Search engines are like a living organism. Although they are programs, they have great artificial intelligence elements that make them “think like humans”. Now, humans like to be given easy tasks to complete. If you were a search engine, would you rather dig for websites or have them ring your bell? I would certainly vote for the latter, since it makes the indexing job way easier.

The art of search engine optimization is just that. Cooperating with the search engines. Make it very simple for them to find you. After all, the sooner they find you, the sooner they index you.

Let’s say that we have just created our website, uploaded some content and want to notify the search engines in a good manner. What should we do? Before starting to analyse, i want to mention them in short bullets:

Create Search Engine Friendly URLS (also called Rewrites).
Craft our post titles based on important keywords.
Refer the main keywords on the main body of the post.
Create a Description and Meta Tags.
Create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines.

These are certainly the most important SEO techniques that you NEED to do for your website. Notice website-creation-tips.com. You ‘ll see that the URL for the post about the different kinds of website has the url :

http://website-creation-tips.com/index.php/2009/05/15/what-kind-of-website-to-create/

The standard URL type would be something like:

http://website-creation-tips.com/index.php?page=3.html

Now, if you were a search engine, what would be easier for you to index? Definately the first. The search engines can immediately see that this post is about website creation only by referencing to the title. Instead, 3.html does not mean anything to a search engine and cannot classify the content by the url. This would be a bad first meeting of that page with the search engines.

Doing that for your URLs might be a tedious process if you’re not using a Content Management System. If you’re not and are using apache, you should need to utilize mod_rewrite and rewrite your urls on such a way, or have someone experienced do that for you. However, the chances are you use a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal. If so, you could download a module for search engine friendly urls and install it to your website and that will do this work for you.

The next thing you should definately give a look at is the title of your posts. That is the next critical part of your webpage. It should be a proper H1 or H2 HTML header element and contain the crucial keywords that refer to your post. In fact, crafting titles is an art by itself and i’ll definately devote an article on that alone. However, in short, you need to keep it informative. Have your title appealing for the readers AND pleasing for the search engine too, in that exact order. For instance, if you wrote an article about how to perform the card trick Triple Charlier, a title like “Card Tricks Explained” is not a good title. Instead, something like “Triple Charlier Card Trick explaination” is much more descriptive, not only for people but for search engines too. Try to give a brief insight of what people should expect of your article while also making it intriguing for the reader to keep on reading.

The Keyword Density in your posts is another element that you need to look for. This not only important for search engines but for Pay Per Click advertising like Adsense or such too, since it’s a very effective way to identify your content. Don’t overdo it though. Mentioning about “Card Trick” continuously is not that good. Be reasonable enough to use it 4-5 times throughout 3-4 paragraphs of content.

You may also want to take a look at the webpage http://website-creation-tips.com/index.php/2009/05/15/what-kind-of-website-to-create/ . If you open up the html source of the webpage, you will see something like:

<meta name=”description” content=”A thorough introduction on what types of sites a webmaster can create and what the best choices are” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”website types, blog, e-shop, e-commerce, portal, social network, video site, image site,blog,e-commerce,e-shop,image site,portal,social network,video site” />

This is another thing that search engines check. BE SURE to provide a DIFFERENT description AND KEYWORDS for EACH of your POSTS. This way, you invite search engines to list you AND tell them what your current webpage is about and this is a GREAT way to treat the search engines in order to earn from them. Don’t be lazy and ALWAYS include a description and important keywords just as you see above.

Finally, i reckon xmlsitemaps to be a great way to achieve consistency with search engines. XML Sitemaps are a way to map your websites contents and inform the various websites about the changes that occur gradually at your website. They are files that contain a listing of your website contents in xml notation. Submitting the new content in such a way is today’s standard for search engines and it is really a great technique to use. Again, most CMS already contain various xml sitemap modules that do this job automatically for you once you install them.

Should you do those for your website, you’re really going in the right direction and will certainly be receiving search engine hits soon. But remember. Do the needed things as described here, be patient, create content and success will meet your website in time.

In the articles to come i’ll be explaining various online and offline marketing techniques in order to attract direct or referenced website traffic to your website. However, don’t forget that search engine traffic should always be your main concern.

Thanx for reading this long article, have a great day