Tuesday, September 2, 2008

How to Use SEO to Drive Traffic to a Website

It is undeniable that SEO is a crucial part of marketing your website over the internet. Every online business owner has to conduct one form of SEO strategy or another to be able to attract traffic to the website. But implementing effective SEO strategies is not that simple because there are a variety of elements that search engines look into before they rank your page at the top. In line with this, here are some simple tips to use SEO as a tool to drive traffic to your site:

1. Don't use trickery. Try to avoid tricking the search engines to make your site rank high. Search engines today are becoming more sophisticated and it will penalize any website that tries to fool it.

2. Avoid using too much flash navigation. While flash may look good on the website; it is impossible for search engines to spider it to know what the content is all about.

3. Always remember the phrase content is king. It is in the search engines best interest to provide relevant information to the searchers. In line with this, it is important for you to provide the kind of content that people are interested in. Don't spam your content with keywords though; make sure that the searchers will benefit from your site as well.

4. Get other sites to link to you. Getting back links to your website will automatically improve your search engine ranking. Take note that search engines frown upon link farm services though because they will put your links with sites that are not relevant to yours.

5. Try to avoid using JavaScript navigation. Search engines cannot understand any of the content that is inside JavaScript. If all your page links are there, you will surely want search engines to find them.

6. Use Google site map. A great way for spiders to get as much information from your site as possible is through site maps. Using Google's own site map is advantageous because it meets all of Google's specifications.

7. Title tags are very effective. This lets search engines know what the texts on your site are all about. Basically, these are the tool tips that appear when you put your pointer on the links on the page.

8. Don't use duplicate content. Never use content that is used on other websites because this can make Google move your site to a supplemental listing which is basically their secondary database.

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