SEO (search engine optimization) refers to techniques to increase Internet traffic. There are numerous techniques for achieving this, some are easier than others. SEO is basically how to increase your presence on search websites which in turn sends more web traffic. The goal for all SEO is to get your website to appear as number one for searches.
A great place to start for your blog is to make sure it is Search Engine Optimized already – use targeted meta keys and meta descriptions to enable search engines to spider your blog more effectively. Once this is done you do not have to look at it again. Whatever your blog or website is about make sure your title, keywords and description all relate and target the area of interest. This is also the information which gets shown in search engine results.
Also, it is very important to write good content. Copying your content from outside sources will get you penalized by search engines. Search engines are now highly developed and clever at offering their users the most relevant content.
Building links to your site is the next step once you have optimized your website correctly and have written good content. The number of inbound links your website has is how search engines determine how good your website is. I.e., if your website has more links than another, search engines will rank you higher and you will get more traffic. If you write content that is keyword rich then this will happen organically but it can take a while. To speed it up you can try some of the following techniques.
Firstly, submit articles to article directories. Sometimes you may find it tough for your articles to be accepted because they get reviewed by reviewers. But, for every article you can get accepted, you will also get a couple of links. Search engines really like this. You should see SEO as a game – trying to get quality links from quality sources.
You can also manually build links to your website by posting and commenting on blogs and forums. Some blog owners allow you to link back to your site with a dofollow link. Dofollow is the colloquial name given to links that search engines will take notice of, compared to nofollow links. Nofollow was invented because SEO marketers would spam/pay for links which meant you would increase traffic dishonestly. Search engines ignore nofollow links and you get no SEO benefit. Spend some time finding blogs and forums that allow you to link your site? This is good because it gives your site SEO benefits but also increases the blog awareness and allows you to network with the blogosphere. The comments should be genuine and relevant to the posts. In most cases, writing something self-promotional (such as: “why not visit my home page?”) will not get approved and you will have wasted effort and time. You should always be a helpful.
Social book marking tools are also a good way for increasing your SEO. You should not spam your blog though, admins are very good at spotting this. But as with directories, if you bookmark your website then you will get a link from a quality site. If a website is well established, search engines give you more kudos from getting a link from there. In other words, a link from a popular social bookmark website will give your site more SEO benefits compared to a smaller website.
One last tip (although there are many more) is to submit your site to directories. They can be a bit troublesome to setup but if you can get a link from a directory it will improve your search engine rankings. A lot of the directories have high page rankings. However, submitting your website to a directory can be confusing because there are normally different options for submission. There are normally many different payment options. The three options are usually: paid for, free with reciprocal links and free without reciprocal links. Paying for links can be quite expensive but you will get fast tracked into the directory. Many of the higher ranked directories only offer paid for submissions. A free link may take months to be approved (as there is often a long waiting list for websites to be accepted). Reciprocal links are not necessarily beneficial for your SEO (these aren’t given credence like one-way links). You may find that they are useful for referral traffic but for SEO they are not useful.
If you follow the above hints and tips then you should see an improvement in your search engine rankings. However you should also definitely be using services to monitor and report your SEO efforts and Internet traffic. This way you will be able to see what has the most benefit and what you can focus more on.
