Driving Traffic to a Site

The first goal of SEO is to draw traffic to a site. But traffic is drawn to sites that are good. So let's take a look at two perspectives on what kind of content draws traffic.

First, a web site worth practicing SEO upon should be a worthy beneficiary: a site with content that at least theoretically has the ability to draw traffic.

Second, one SEO techniquein the absence of this worthy contentis to create it from scratch. So bear in mind that creating content to draw traffic is one of the most effectiveand simplestSEO techniques. As such, it's worth having a look at content that draws traffic.

Content That Draws Traffic

• There's a great deal of variation in goodsuccessfulcontent web sites. The purpose of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:
• The site is humorous, and makes visitors laugh. While humor is a matter of personal taste, and varies tremendously depending on demographics of the target, humorous features can draw a great deal of traffic to a site. One downside is that humor tends to get stale quickly. An example of a humorous site that is popular is Googlefight, http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
• The site provides a useful free service. Web services that are free (and desirable) can draw astounding levels of traffic. A good example is TinyURL, http://tinyurl.com, which provides a practical and very useful (but simple) service: it allows you to convert long, unwieldy URLsfor example, those you often see from Amazon.com when you select an inventory itemto short, convenient URLs that are easy to use in HTML code (and easy to enter in a browser). TinyURL gets hundreds of millions of hits per month, and is able to convert some of this traffic for other purposes (such as making money from advertising).
• The site is an online magazine, newspaper, or blog. Newsworthy content or interesting opinion pieces can draw considerable traffic. But the fact that anyone can put up a blog means that you'll have to go to considerable lengths to distinguish your content.
• The site provides practical information. Many people turn to the Web as their first line of approach for finding information: about technology, relationships, travel destinations, health, and much more. Adding useful articles is often one of the first steps taken by SEO consultancies to beef up traffic to a destination site. Obviously, the more closely related the articles are to the kinds of traffic you want to target, the better this will work from an SEO perspective.
• The site services a community, and provides communication tools for that community. The Web is largely about community, and involving community in your site serves several SEO purposes. Not only will your community help keep your content fresh, it's also self-selecting: if you enable your community with care it can help to tell you which topics are of interest, and what content areas will draw traffic.

Web Site Metrics and Measuring Traffic
An important component of SEO is getting a handle on web site metrics and measuring traffic. This is not as easy as it sounds, because a great many competing terms are used, and data is not always reliable.

From an SEO perspective, you need to establish a plan for measuring traffic so that you can find out objectively which SEO measures have succeeded.

How much traffic do you aspire to? Another important question, because SEO approaches will differ depending on whether you want to generate tons of general broad traffic, or if you are targeting a narrow (but significant) niche.

A good (and reasonably objective) source of information and metrics about general and high-trafficked sites is Alexa.

Read More......

What SEO Can (and Cannot) Do

SEO can drive more traffic to your web site. If you plan carefully, you can impact the kind of traffic driven to your site. This means that you need to consider SEO as part of your general market research and business plan. Sure, most businesses want traffic. But not just any traffic. Just as the goal of a brick-and-mortar business is to have qualified customersones with money in their pocket who are ready to buy when they walk in the door, an online business ideally wants qualified traffic.

Qualified traffic is not just any traffic. It is made up of people who are genuinely interested in your offering, who are ready to buy it, and have the means to buy it. This implies that to successfully create an SEO campaign you need to plan: this means understanding your ideal prospect, their habits and who they are, and creating a step-by-step scheme to "lure" this prospect to your site where he or she can be converted to a customer.

In addition, SEO cannot spin gold from straw, or make a purse out of a sow's ear. Garbage sitesor sites that exist as scamswill not draw huge amounts of traffic. Or if they do, these sites won't draw traffic for long. Google and other search engines will pull the plug as soon as they see what is going on.

As time goes by, SEO needs to be regarded as an adjunct to the first law of the web: good content draws heavy traffic. There is no substitute for content people really want to find.

While best practices SEO should always be observed, there needs to be a sense of proportion in how SEO is used. It may not make sense to create a "Potemkin Village" using SEO to draw traffic to a site if the fundamental site doesn't yield high returns. In other words, SEO that is costly to implement is becoming regarded as one more aspect of advertising campaign managementand subject to the same discipline of cost-benefit analysis applied to all other well-managed advertising campaigns.

Read More......

SEO at its Core

The core practices of good SEO are fairly simple:

• Understand how your pages are viewed by search engine software

• Take common sense steps to make sure your pages are optimized from the viewpoint of these search engines

  Fortunately, this essentially means practicing good design, which makes your sites easy to use for human visitors as well.

• Avoid certain over-aggressive SEO practices, which can get your sites blacklisted by the search engines

From a broader viewpoint, good SEO involves creating an effective business campaign: understanding your sales proposition and benefits, creating a strategy for drawing and converting prospects, and being better at what you do than your competition.

Read More......

SEO's Evolution

Originally fairly narrowly conceived as a set of techniques for rising to the top of search engine listings, search engine optimization, or SEO, has conceptually expanded to include all possible ways of promoting web traffic.

Learning how to construct web sites and pages to improveand not harmthe search engine placement of those web sites and web pages has become a key component in the evolution of SEO. This central goal of SEO is sometimes called core SEO (as opposed to broader, non-core, web traffic campaigns, which may include paid advertisements).

Search engine placement means where a web page appears in an ordered list of search query resultsit's obviously better for pages to appear higher up and toward the beginning of the list returned by the search engine in response to a user's query.

Not all queries are created equal, so part of effective SEO is to understand which queries matter to a specific web site. It's relatively easy to be the first search result returned for a query that nobody else cares about.

Clearly, driving traffic to a web site can make the difference between commercial success and failure. So SEO experts have come to look at search engine placement as only one of their toolsand to look at the broader context of web technologies and business mechanisms that help to create and drive traffic.

SEO is rapidly evolving into an advertising discipline that must be measured using the metrics of cost-effectiveness that are applied to all advertising techniques.

Read More......

Offer quality content and services

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.

While the content you create could be on any topic imaginable, here are some recommended best
practices:

Good practices for content

Write easy-to-read text - Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow. Avoid:

• writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes.
• embedding text in images for textual content (users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines can't read it).

Stay organized around the topic - It's always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster. Avoid:

• dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation

Use relevant language - Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time baseball fan might search for, an acronym for the National League Championship Series, while a new fan might use a more general query like. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google AdWords provides a handy Keyword Tool that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Also, Google Webmaster Tools provides youwith the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site.

Create fresh, unique content - New content will not only keep your existing visitor base
coming back, but also bring in new visitors. Avoid:

• rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users
• having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site (more on duplicate content)

Offer exclusive content or services - Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.

Create content primarily for your users, not search engines - Designing your site around your visitors' needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines
usually produces positive results. Avoid:

• inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users
• having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add little value for users
• deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines

Read More......

Does Your SEO Content Sell

While written with search engines in mind, SEO content should also consider the end users of your website; your potential customers. Attracting masses of traffic, regardless of how targeted that traffic, is only a portion of the battle.

If the content you've used is next to meaningless or smacks of being written solely to rank well in the search engines then your website will under perform and your online business efforts will suffer as a consequence.

Finding the perfect blend between search optimised content and offering an enhanced user experience is critical to better website performance.

Treat Your Business Like A Business

Every website, blog, and other online real estate should be viewed as a business if it is being used to generate an income of any sort. This means that the customer experience is equally as important to your website as it is to your business as a whole.

A good customer experience means more sales, greater conversion rates, improved customer loyalty, and increased customer retention and return business.

Small businesses and bricks and mortar commercial ventures have been living by the ethos that "the customer is always right" for decades and this should go for your online business as well.

Every Word Counts

From the home page to the deeper, product pages, and from your blog to your support forums, the intention of each visible page is to promote your business. Whether you're trying to ensure that customers continue to return to your service or you intend to attract new customers this means that your website content needs to be set up to sell as well as attract the attention of the search engines.

The CTA (Call To Action)

Decide on your Call To Action (CTA) for each of your pages. Once you've done this, don't simply give visitors the opportunity to follow your CTA but ensure that they're left with little choice but to do so. Entice them, emote them, but above all ensure that you convert them.

Identify Your CTA

The desired action for each page can differ significantly. On the home page of your site, you are most likely to want to divert customers to the product or services pages where they can learn more information. On the deeper pages, such as product description pages, the desired action is adding the item to the shopping basket or proceeding to checkout; alternatively, it could be to request a quote, make a phone call, or register their details.

Make sure you know what your CTA is before you write the content because if you don't know then your website visitors certainly won't.

Stand Out And Stand Apart

At the same time as identifying your CTA, you should also consider your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is the single thing that makes your business or your website stand out from every other one in the same industry. Virtually every website has one even though many website owners don't know about it.

Think about the things that benefit your customers and not those that benefit you. Free shipping, discount on bulk orders, hand made products, a no fuss money back guarantee, or a truly personal service can all be used as effective USPs if they are sold properly.

Website Content That Performs

Website content can do so much more than attract a flurry of visitors to a website, and indeed it should. Yes, traffic is important, because without it, the most effective combination of CTA and USP in the world would bear no relevance but never forget the end user.

(About the Author: Matt Jackson)

Read More......

Make effective use of robots.txt

A robots.txt file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named robots.txt, is placed in the root directory of your site.

The address of our robots.txt file


All compliant search engine bots (denoted by the wildcard * symbol) shouldn't access and crawl the content under /images/ or any URL whose path begins with /search

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Webmaster Tools has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file.
Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particularsubdomain, you'll have to create a separate robots.txt file for that subdomain. For more informationon robots.txt, we suggest this Webmaster Help Center guide on using robots.txt files.

There are a handful of other ways to prevent content appearing in search results, such as adding
"NOINDEX" to your robots meta tag, using .htaccess to password protect directories, and using
Google Webmaster Tools to remove content that has already been crawled. Google engineer Matt Cutts walks through the caveats of each URL blocking method in a helpful video.


Good practices for robots.txt

Use more secure methods for sensitive content - You shouldn't feel comfortable using robots.txt to block sensitive or confidential material. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). Also, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard could disobey the instructions of your robots.txt. Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL of the content that you don't want seen. Encrypting the content or password-protecting it with .htaccess are more
secure alternatives.
Avoid:

• allowing search result-like pages to be crawled (users dislike leaving one search result page and landing on another search result page that doesn't add significant value for them)
• allowing a large number of auto-generated pages with the same or only slightly different content to be crawled: "Should these 100,000 near-duplicate pages really be in a search engine's index?"
• allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled

Read More......

Google Index

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for any webpage, but you may not be making the most out of them.




Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or "sponsored" results,
such as Google AdWords

Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine", we'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines.

An example may help our explanations, so we've created a fictitious website to follow throughout the guide. For each topic, we've fleshed out enough information about the site to illustrate the point being covered. Here's some background information about the site we'll use:
• Website/business name: "Brandon's Baseball Cards"
• Domain name: brandonsbaseballcards.com
• Focus: Online-only baseball card sales, price guides, articles, and news content
• Size: Small, ~250 pages
Your site may be smaller or larger than this and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discussed below should apply to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we'd love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Webmaster Help Group.

Read More......

Search Enggine Submit Express

SEO - SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will analyze your website and critique you on how well it will rank on crawler based search engines.

Search Engine Submission - Our Search Engine Submission service will submit your website to over 300 search engines and directories through their free website submission program. We will also add your site to the Google Adwords Paid Sponsor Program (All part of your monthly fee) so you will see hits immediately following your signup with us.

To make known our website, we need to do a process called submiting to search enggine available on the Internet. If the process is for each search enggine it will take us a lot. And each search enggine have different ways also.

Here I have found a very efficient way for many to register to search enggine in one step, do not need to visit each search engine. That is by using the tool that has been provided by http://www.submitexpress.com/ we enter the address live blog or website, and live the next step.

Next step :

And now click image:

Search Engine Optimization and SEO Tools
hopefully useful

Read More......

The SEO Picture

If you have a blog posting that there is a lot of pictures, the actual image file can be beneficial to bring the reader through the search engine google or yahoo. Maybe some of us who have less or no attention to the role of SEO images for the site you, or may not know how. How, is using the ALT attribute on the IMG tag.

ALT attribute for IMG tag on this, you can provide keywords that match the pictures and write in the form of diskripsi but not too long. If there is one post in two or more images and do not repeat the keyword.

Example : world.jpg, america.jpg, music.jpg

The provision of the image file name must also be considered, not the origin of the name make. Try the name of the file containing the keywords, use underscores instead of spaces, do not try to repeat key words and naming the file is too long and do not use a keyword too many do not.

Example : My-music.jpg, My_wive.jpg

Hopefully useful.

Read More......

About Search Engine Optimization

If you want your website to be on the order of the highest in Google, Yahoo, or other search engines, you need to run the technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization). By applying this technique SEO, blog or website you not only be at the highest order in the search engines, but your blog will also have many visitors.

Try entering the keyword "click here" on google, what sites appear? Download Acrobat Reader? Why? While the pages do not have any posts of the "click here". Why can so?

SEO techniques there are two types, namely ON and OFF PAGE PAGE.

ON PAGE SEO techniques, then create pages as well as we may in the search engine. Namely by choosing the appropriate title, keyword adequate but not excessive, adding a link on a keyword, bold, italic, and so forth. The following tips techniques ON PAGE:

1. Focus on your keywords, think a moment about who will be entering a keyword in what Google or Yahoo is right to your website.
2. Use the title contains a keyword.
3. Use the keyword 5 - 10 times in the content of your writing to.
4. Use the ALT (and link to image) containing your keyword.
5. Use bold and italic on your keyword.
6. Use the link on your keyword.

OFF PAGE SEO techniques, is a way to link as much as possible towards our blog. You can participate in the exchange of links with a friend, or install a link on myspace page, comments, guest books and so forth. The more links that point to our website, then we will be more PAGERANK high. PAGERANK means the higher the more likely we are in the website's highest order of search engines.

You should also consider Anchor Text on the link to the website you. What is on the Adobe website the highest ranking in Google for the keyword "click here" is because many websites that there is a link to the page with the words: Download Adobe Reader, click here. The "click here" is called the Anchor text as a link. Try the links that lead to your website in accordance with the keywords that you become a target.

The following are the things that are forbidden in the SEO (blackhat SEO), if you run this prohibition, then your website will be search engine blacklists (not index):

1. Make a doorway, that is a special page for search engines that are not useful for visitors to your site.
2. nstall a link on your website, including the category "bad neighborhood," there is a site that already-in-blacklist (including a link farm).
3. The program paid links.
4. Build a link in a very large amount in a short time.
5. Its contents match the other website.

Search engines at this time is the smart, make a website or blog your weight and useful for visitors, then your website will be visited by many people from all over the world.

Read More......

To the list of Search Engine

For the beginner course bloggers are still confused, how it will be read by search engines, because search engines are now many in number, I will try to pare the list of simple steps to some of the famous search engines:

List to
How to sign up to yahoo, you must first have an email address at yahoo. If you already have, please click https: / / siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com / submit. please fill in with the username and password you yahoo. After the log will then be available for klolom in the content, please fill the field with your URL, then click the button ADD URL. If you want to enter the address of the feed, and then add your URL atom.xml behind you. Example http://caramenghasilkanuangviainternet.blogspot.com/atom.xml

To the list of google
How to register to google, please click http://www.google.com/addurl/, When are on signup page there are several steps you have to do is fill in the fields provided, namely:

v URL -> Fill in the URL of your blog

Comments v -> Fill with the keyword or keywords associated with your blog

v Fill empty box with the letters available Verification

v Click the Add button URL

v Finish.

In google, after registering then you will not be directly read on search engines, the time range of possibilities between 1 to 4 weeks. When the 4-week blog you still have not read / terindeks, try your list again.

Listing to MSN
How to register Msn, you try to click http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2 please enter your URL and verivy in the column is available, then click Submit URL.

Read More......