Basics of SEO For Better Website Traffic

Have you just started a website and don’t have any idea on how to go about making it tick? Don’t worry. There are a lot of companies offering their services that will help make your website work for your business. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it can be defined as the process of increasing the quality and volume of the traffic to a particular website. SEO will help your site appear higher in search engine results which will draw people to your website and will ultimately profit you. So if you are a newbie in the web arena, hiring a SEO company to work for you will be your best bet.

But before you start putting your hard-earned money into a SEO company, please choose carefully. There are a lot of companies online who are amateurs in this field and will hiring them will ultimately have a negative impact on your website. Companies that promise you “guaranteed page 1 rankings” are probably no good. This is because SEO is tough and since people who surf online are pretty unpredictable, such high guarantees are meaningless. So before you hire a SEO company, you better learn a bit about SEO yourself.

• Optimization of each page: This is the most important part. Each page of your website should have concise content that will rank it high on search engines. Optimizing the specific content on each page will result in traffic.
• Keyword optimization: Keywords are what people search for in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN. If your website is filled with appropriate keywords and a potential customer searches for it on a search engine, your site will come up leading to traffic. Keyword research is definitely not easy. There are quite a few keyword tools available online like “Keyword Discovery” and “Wordtracker” which you can use.
• Good page content: Writing content for your website is not very easy. A good SEO company will be able to write in such a way SO as to attract readers with its user-friendly writing as well as keep the keyword-density right to rank it high on Google.
• Optimization of page titles: If you hire a smart SEO professional to do your web promotion, one way he is going to get your web site kicking is put the key phrases in the blue bar that appears on top of the screen. This will not only help your website rank high, it will also help the people who visited it to remember exactly what it is all about.
• Online directories: For proper SEO promotion, submitting your website to online directories is extremely necessary. Not only will it drive traffic, search engines will also find it easier to index you.
• Be descriptive in links and images: Another great SEO trick is to be as descriptive as possible in the links and images of your website. Let the person clicking your link know exactly what they can expect. In fact, put the keywords in the descriptions. This will let the search engines find your site through links and images. The anchor text should be descriptive with all the top keywords.
• Make your site spider-friendly: You may have created a wonderful website with Javascript and Flash graphics that is sure to dazzle everyone who visits it. But remember, search engines cannot decipher these codes. So if you do have a lot of graphics, a clever SEO promotion idea would be to allow the search engine “spiders” to crawl deep into your site with navigation alternatives so that your site gets indexed.
• Fresh content: If you have created a website and want to increase traffic to it, you need to work on it regularly. Search engines always look out for websites where the content is updated regularly. Even if it is a product you are selling, putting fresh content will make search engines come back regularly and index your site. Forums and blogs are a great way to add new content with the least effort. But don’t start a blog just for web promotion. Start it only if you have interesting things to share regularly with your readers.
• Be unique: Uniqueness counts in every field and the web is no different. If your website offers something new and unique to the target market, search engines will not only rank you high, random people will actually start referring it in blogs, forums and chat rooms. Interesting websites will draw interested people whose word of mouth will ultimately profit you. Think digg.com, eBay.com… you get the idea?
• Social networks: Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Friendfeed and Bebo are gradually gaining acceptance as a very good SEO tool. Getting people to click on the link to your website in these networks is a great way to drive traffic. If people on these social networks like your website, you can be sure that they will tell other people about it the next time they “tweet” or “write on walls”! Dell and CNN are just two examples of the stupendous business success to be gained from these sites.
• Website promotion: Promoting your website is not easy and if you find it too time-consuming, hire a SEO professional who will do the job for you. He will submit your website to different online directories and will start optimizing your search engine rankings.
• SEO affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing allows people to refer other people to your site and they get paid when the person referred makes a buy. So actually you are sharing your profit with people who help you make it. It’s a wonderful way of increasing traffic.

SEO is a science. One mistake that you should never make is trying to trick search engines. Tricks like hiding keywords by making the text color the same as the background color, joining links, and other sneaky tricks will ultimately see you gain an exit from search engine results. And it will be hard to gain entry once again.

So the best thing for you would be to make your website an interesting place to be and subscribe to a great SEO program that will let people know that it is!