subject: Using Search Engine Optimization to get Web Traffic [print this page] Using Search Engine Optimization to get Web Traffic
SEO plays an important role in driving traffic to your website. Majority of internet users use search engine to retrieve information from web. The web traffic of any web page is influenced by its page rank or ranking assigned to it by a search engine for relevancy of content.
How search engines work?
Different search engines use different algorithms to rate any website. So a website can have very different rankings in different search engines. Also different search engines use different criteria to analyze any website. For ex: Google makes use of crawlers that crawl through the content of a page and check its relevancy. Here more importance is given to the keywords in content. On the other hand yahoo gives more preference to the back links of a page.
This should be remembered that crawler reads the content in simple text format without any textual enhancements. So, it is good to decorate your text but you should not place the keywords or important links in picture or other formats or these will not be read by the search engines.
How to improve your website ranking?
1. Make good use of keywords
Now we know that search engines rank a website for its content relevancy relative to queries of users. Therefore to move to top in search results, your webpage must contain the right keywords which are popularly used in searches for any specific topic. Keyword density determines the number of keywords in your content. Having your article flooded with keywords is considered spamming by search engines and it will lead to blocking of your website.
Where to place keywords?
Keywords are necessary at three places. The title should be chosen so that it contains relevant keywords. The keywords in title have higher preference in search results than those in content. Your page ranking is likely to improve if your title matches the query words of users. The first and the last paragraphs should contain the main keywords. These are paid more attention as compared to rest of the content. Thirdly, the content should also make use of different keywords after every five to six lines. This helps maintaining the required keyword density.
How to get the right keywords?
To help you select right keywords for your content, various tools are provided on the web. The most popular keyword tool is the Google AdWords. It directly gives you the keywords related to your website comparing it with the most common searches about the website's topic.
So, just use the correct keywords with right amount in your content to increase web traffic.
2. Link building
Link building greatly helps to improve search engine rankings and enhances the amount of web traffic significantly. The search engines compare the links coming to your website to evaluate it. The important factor determining your website ranking is the number of clicks to your website's URL. Number of back links is an important feature that helps search engines to get this information. Back links are those links which are placed on other web pages and lead to your website.
How to get back links?
Link building is a simple business. You can have back links for free by trading your back links to forward links on your website. You can also pay to other websites for every click you get to your web pages via them. Other method is to share advertisement revenue with these websites for your back links.
One thing must be remembered, search engine does not want to consider back links present on content farms or link farms. Therefore, search engines have changed their algorithms accordingly. So, having multiple links on a link farm may prove unsuccessful and even ruinous sometimes.
These are two simple methods of search engine optimization to get web traffic to your website. Simple as it may have been, still it needs quite a large amount of time and effort to generate the traffic you want. Patience and hard work must go hand in hand for these methods to perform effectively.
