Re: how to promote websites by using SEO
Hello all
I thought I'd weigh in on this discussion with my own experience. I have two sites in particular that rank extremely high in a the major engines for my key words/terms so I think I can offer some thoughts that might be helpful.
Number one is - Written CONTENT is king. Well written textual content is "spider food". Articles (content) should be a minimum of 500 words, with correct grammar and spelling-error free. Regular addictions to your content increase your standing otherwise the site is deemed stale after a time. It is generally advisable to keep your subject matter distinct as in once subject per page if possible.
Proper headings (H1 and H2) ... I'm still wondering how to do that in DP6 really but am using bold <strong> type and type size as a work-around until that is solved ... are important and should contain the key words/phrases for the subject matter of the page/article. Your page title, description and body text should repeat those words/terms but make sure you do not over use them as that is considered 'spamming' and gets you penalized ... generally using good English will keep that in balance ... if it sounds awkward to read it will likely appear awkward to the spiders reviewing the page.
Images ... always apply alt text (a description) as that gives the images something to offer the spiders.
Flash ... avoid cluttering your page, particularly at the top with flash ... spiders cannot read inside flash files so they are useless for SEO purposes and in fact can actually create something of a barrier to the spiders trying to crawl your content.
Page naming ... your html/htm file should be the keywords/phrases for the page ... i.e search_engines.htm would be far less effective than how_to_make_content_readable_to_search_engines.htm Generally I try to make the page title the htm file name as well.
Little trick ... If you are monetizing your page put some Google Adsense on it .. pulls Google to you and since they still represent the lion's share of search traffic, they are the ones to please.
Google also has webmaster tools and their tool to generate a sitemap is great as a sitemap is really important.
Linking. Internal links between content on your site (from page to page) is a great way to help the spiders move laterally through your site as well as vertically through pages. Linking out to other sites is OK but don't over-do it as that will pull rank from you and push it to the site you're linking to (basically outbound links imply that your site is subordinate to the site you are linking to.) Inbound links are gold provided they are from sites that have compatible content. In other words MarthasHotDogs.com linking to ImTheXaraWiz.com isn't worth much for obvious reasons ... whereas JoesPrintShop.com linking to you is great due to the compatible nature of the sites.
Promotion. The fastest and easiest way to do that is to lose your shyness and post links to your new material as you write it on sites like Redit, SumbleUpon and others ... you'll generate spikes of traffic but out of that, if your site is good, you'll keep a percentage of visitors coming back and also referring others to your site (virally marketing)
Install tracking code in ALL your pages ... I use StatCounter ... its free, excellent and they give GREAT support when something weird is going on.
Well those are the basics of some key issues I think will get you started, but remember that from crawl to indexing can take a while ... don't expect to show up right away in search returns. But I will tell you from experience that when you see your site climbing (which you can with StatCounter ... you can actually visit the search page and see where you ranked) its a thrill and when you see pages coming up in the top ten of tens of millions you know you're doing your work.
Hope this helps everyone!
Cheers
Paul
Paul J
"If it was easy ... everyone would be doing it!
http://www.tactical-graphic-design.com
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