Website SEO

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Building Search Engine Traffic

Just because you build it - does not necessarily mean they will come.

Users and search engines alike need to know that your website exists, and this general process is known as online marketing. Specifically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the art of optimizing web pages and back links to achieve the best possible search engine results for keywords and search phrases that best describe the product, service, or information that your website is offering.

Understanding the Product and the Target Audience 

Plan Ahead to Get Ahead

A website's domain name and URL names are essential to achieving the best possible search engine results in the shortest amount of time and the least amount of effort. The key to successful planning and marketing online is understanding exactly what value you add to the internet and what questions you'll be able to answer. By identifying and focusing on these key words and phrases, you'll help the search engines know what you're offering. Be specific and complete: The more you add to the discussion the more likely a page is to be picked up with long tail keywords of more than a word or two like "SEO building website traffic"

Getting Backlinks 

Remember: Quality over Quantity

A website needs back links from other domains if it is going to get direct or search engine traffic without paying for each user. Avoid traffic exchanges and other "too good to be true" promises because this won't deliver good value to your advertisers and it doesn't help establish your website brand over the long term. Find good links.

What is a good link? It is a link from a related page using the anchor text you want to rank highly for. A related page means a page that discusses the same keywords as the anchor text, and this can be improved if it matches the website's title, headings, and commonly used terms.

For this squidoo page, a good link would be Website SEO for all the reasons mentioned above. Notice that the anchor text matches both the web page's title, and the URL of the link destination.

The other, almost ironic thing, is the page with backlinks needs backlinks pointing to it. The higher the rank of the linking page the more rank is pushed through the link to the destination.

Do Links Improve Over Time? 

It depends.

What is important is the rank of the page linking to you, and this is dependent on the number of pages linking there.

Sometimes when you get a backlink, it starts off at the top page of a high PR domain and then falls down to the archives. If this is the case and that page doesn't get its own backlinks, the value of your link probably reached its peak when it was new and steadily declined afterward. This could be the case on any of the user-editable websites like blogs, forums, and social bookmarking. If your link goes to the front page of Digg, you'll have a PR 8 backlink but only for a day.

On the other hand, maybe you leave a comment on a blog post that is rediscovered a few months or weeks later only to become its own viral hit. If people are constantly talking about and linking to the page that links you, that backlink with increase value over time.

PageRank, SERPs, and Traffic 

How to measure your progress and success?

Many webmasters will talk about pagerank and SERPs as a means of measuring or comparing the results of their efforts.

Pagerank is a value that Google assigns to a web page based on the number and importance of relative back links. In itself, this does not guarantee search traffic, but it is part of the formula that determines Google's search results. Paying for links can actually reduce your page rank, so stick to the natural links you can get and avoid buying them.

SERPs is how your site ranks for your chosen key words. This is based moreso on the anchor text of the links and whether or not those links are on related sites that share the anchor text's keywords.

Traffic is, of course, what ultimately matters. Google analytics is the best way to understand your traffic, because sheer numbers don't necessarily matter if people aren't staying to see your website or if they've arrived through unrelated searches. Good traffic means people found what they were looking for when they found your website. This is what truly counts.

Are you concerned with Google Pagerank? 

Google Pagerank is an easily visible metric to measure a website's relative importance. But, it doesn't actually indicate how well your site will rank in specific search terms and it doesn't account for recent changes in link structure. How concerned are you about your domain's pagerank?

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The Goal 

The proper goal is to get the right visitors to a website, not necessarily to get as much traffic as possible. Remember, if someone isn't interested in what the site is all about in the first place, there isn't much chance they're going to be a customer.

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Related Books on Amazon 

Increase Your Web Traffic in a Weekend, Fifth Edition

Amazon Price: $18.99 (as of 11/26/2009) Buy Now

Increase Your Web Traffic in a Weekend

Amazon Price: $24.99 (as of 11/26/2009) Buy Now

The future of SEO? 

Speculation and Hints from Google

What does the future of SEO have in store? Some clues come from Google's latest interface push: Some users have been able to sort and order their search results with voting and comments.

If search engines continue to implement features of social bookmarking sites, the goal of Democratizing the internet will be another step closer to reality.

Rather than focusing on backlinks and offsite optimization, website builders will need to create the content that makes users glad to visit, look around, bookmark, and come back later.

Already, rumors of a browse rank help explain why some sites rank higher than others based on the actions of users once they arrive on the site, and this is likely to be the push that shapes the future of online marketing.

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by independent1

I'm a political science major and college financial aid analyst from Florida. I like building websites its got to be the cheapest way of getting a me... (more)

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