How To Get More Visitors on Your Website by Search Engine Optimization
12 rules to receive more traffic, thanks to improvement in your SEO.
Keep an old domain name, but...
Because new domains may take time to become visible in results of search
engines, Google mainly, you should avoid to use a new domain if possible.
Maybe you can register an expired domain, that is already indexed on search engines,
if it matches the topic of your future site, see on the list
of expired domains.
For foreign users, use a top-level domain related to the language used
on the site (Ex: ".es" for spanish): this is just has having two
more ranking points! But the name of the domain is very important also and
different languages use different words, so use a name in the language of
your visitors...
Keywords in the domain name may improve the position in search results. They have to be separated by a dash to be recognized. Remember the expertsexchange.com site that has had to change for experts-exchange.com.
Think to visitors, not to robots
Improve the content to match what visitors can expect and not to to match what search engines expect. Robots (used by search engines) imitate the behavior of visitors, and will give your page a better rank, if your site is better for visitors: don't try to imitate the robots yourself!
The title is important
Inside the <head> section a <title> tag gives to search
engines the title of the page. This phrase will be displayed in search
results. (The H1 tag may be a replacement).
This title is very informative for search engines. Don't leave the "untitled"
word generated by editors, and avoid short phrases as "The Car", "Home",
for example, put a full 50 characters length sentence that you consider to
be the best description of the page and that let user click on the link.
Don't forget any keyword
- The number of occurences of a keyword in a page is not important providing it is used at least two or three times.
- But the variety of keywords used in your text is important.
- By using a word you are the only one to have, you are sure to reach the first position in results of requests that includes this word. This is better than a 10/10 PageRank!
- Proximity of keywords inside the page is a factor to select the page.
- The main page especially must contains all the main keywords related to the whole site, and each other page, the keywords related to the topic of the page.
- You may consider keywords moved from the "keyword" meta tag to titles and sub-titles (h1, h2, ... tags) inside the page.
- Some sites for webmaster provide a keyword analysis that will said you which groups of keywords are more often given to search engines, and thus what visitors are likely to search.
Don't put barrier on the way of the robot
- There are some intricacies robots can not pass through: JavaScript links, form's actions.
- All pages must be accessible from another page of the site by a least one hyperlink (a tag).
- Flash and other such stuff that slow down the loading of the page, and the lack of text let the page ignored by crawlers.
- Think to build a sitemap if robots need for help to index the site.
Name of anchor, "title" and "alt" attributes, and filenames are important
All these attributes must be descriptive: keywords related to the destination
page or to the image. Keywords in filename must be separated by "-"
(not by "_" even if the later trends to be recognized now by engines).
For example this label: "Rules to improve traffic thanks to search
engine" is better than "Best traffic" as label of link on a page.
For the ranking of the target page, but also for the indexing of the
source page itself.
Don't forget meta tags
Two meta-tags are useful: "description" and "robots".
The "Googlebots" meta is equivalent to "robots",
but for Google only. The "Keywords" meta is not used by Google
but maybe some engines use it yet.
Of course you don't need to put them manually, use a meta-tag generator
as Spider SEO (coded by
myself) for example.
Be a detective
This task is very tedious. Prepare a list of groups of keywords, that
match your page. Do a search on main search engines: Google, Live, Yahoo.
Look at pages that have a better rank than your page. Visit these sites
to know why they have a better rank.
You can also register your site at Google for an analysis: how visitors come
on your pages.
Artificial links and real reference
Yes, you can get these links from lots of directories than nobody never
visit (not including the Yahoo or Dmoz directories that are often linked
and visited)... This is an artifact of popularity. This is also a poor
value. A good and unique content will provide you a lot more links by
keen visitors, this real popularity is a criterion for search engine's
algorithms and will improve seriously your PageRank.
When your site is really useful and complete in its topic, and not before,
submit it to the Dmoz directory.
Avoid broken links
Brokens links are very annoying for visitors and this is considered also by search engine to evaluate your site. From time to time, test your site with some software envolved in broken links detection as this tool at W3C.
Build a site map
When you make a site map visible to search engines , you can get an analysis
of your site and a report of errors. A guide and a free tool to build a site
map, Simple
Map is available on this site.
A sitemap is useful where not all pages in your website are indexed by search
engines, this can be verified with the request site:www.scriptol.com
to any search engine (with your domain name of course).
Lenghten visit duration
The duration of visits and the number of pages viewed by a visitor is a factor of quality. Retain your visitors with complete but not too long articles, 20 KB sized pages perhaps, or interesting links, or enigmas, or suspense...
References
This guide have been written from my personal experience in several websites since 1999, from forums, and posts on blogs of web experts...
- Missing backlinks.
- Dmoz.org. Various sites dedicated to advices and tool to improve popularity.
- Guidelines from Google to design your web site, and make it indexed more easily.
- The true Google's Algorithm.
- SEO Forum.
-
Press release. List of websites to submit news about a product, an enterprise.