subject: Website Optimization Tips For Improving Web Site Traffic [print this page] The search engines need keywords in order to find your web pages. To maximize web site traffic, you need to know how to optimize your web site for search engines. Here are some website optimization tips.
Search engines can only read text. The keywords in the text tell the engines what the pages are about; therefore, you should have many pages of text on your web site.
Optimize the articles on your web site for different keywords. Optimizing more than one page for a particular keyword is like buying two lottery tickets for the same number.
Search engines cannot look into images and videos. A human can read the contents, but the search engine cannot. A beautiful flash-only web site cannot attract anyone to see it.
Optimize each page you are promoting for one main page keyword. Some people also accept up to two additional secondary keywords. An exception will be noted below.
In choosing keywords, consider the number of searches for the keywords -- more is obviously better. Don't optimize pages for keywords with too few searches. You would be wasting your time optimizing pages for keywords with too few searches.
Consider the number of other pages on the web containing that exact phrase -- more is worse. Don't optimize pages for keywords with too many competing pages. Your pages won't get the the first page of Google anyway.
Consider the number of pages optimized for a keyword by including it in the page title, the page URL, and in anchor text of links leading to the page. The more serious competition that exists, the worse.
Consider the pages that show up on page one of search engine results for the keyword. Can you beat them? How many back links do they have? Writing articles to be published elsewhere can give you more than a modest number of back links, but do not expect to get thousands of back links easily.
If you have a commercial website, consider whether people are searching for a keyword in order to buy something, or whether they are only gathering information.
Include the page's main keyword in the page's title. Search engines seem to consider a keyword in the page title to be especially significant.
Include the main keyword in the page URL, that is, in your domain name, in the page name, or in the name of the folder in which the page is located.
Include the main keywords in the first and last paragraphs. Include the main keywords a few times throughout the page. This will indicate that the entire page is devoted to the topic. However, do not include the keywords too many times; it will look like you are padding the page. (One estimate is that a main keyword should appear as 3%-5% of the phrases of the same length.)
Put the keywords in H1 and H2 headings and in boldface. Human readers pay attention to them, so the search engines do too.
Include a longer page with a couple of thousand words. Use semantically related phrases throughout. This will give the search engines a good page to send all those semantically-related queries that do not have pages optimized for them. You want to pick up the multitude of infrequent searches all at once.
Do not make the page unreadable in the attempt to include keywords. Once you have human readers, make them want to linger.
Create links to your page that contain the page keywords in the anchor text. Provide text links on your own web site between pages. For back links from other sites, put articles in article directories which include the links in their resource boxes.
These website optimization tips, if you follow them, will improve your website traffic.
