SEO, or search engine optimization refers to the techniques to increase search engine traffic for your site. There are numerous techniques to achieving this, some may be less time consuming than others. To give a brief introduction to what SEO is, it is basically how to increase your presence on search websites which in turn sends you more web traffic. Appearing as the top result for specific keywords is often the goal of SEO Services efforts.
It is important to make sure your website is search engine optimized already – use targeted meta keys and targeted meta descriptions to enable search engines to spider your site more effectively. This is a onetime task, once it’s been set upcorrectly you do not have to do it again. Whatever your blog or website is about make sure your title, keywords and description are all relevant to the area of interest. The meta title and description will also be shown in search engine results so make sure it is relevant and correct.
Furthermore, make sure you write good, original content. Copying content that is not your own will get you penalized by search engines. Search engines are now highly developed and smart at offering their users the most relevant content. Thus, if you merely copy content you will be penalized and marked down in the search rankings.
Once you have optimized your website correctly and written good, original content, the next step is to build links to your site. One of the most important ways a search engine determines how good your site is by how many inbound links the site has. For example, if your website has more links than another, search engines will rank you higher and you will get more traffic. If you write good content that is keyword driven then this will happen naturally but it can be a long process. To speed it up you may want to try some of the following techniques.
Firstly, write original article and submit them to article directories. Sometimes it may be challenging for the articles to get accepted as they get reviewed by human reviewers. But, for every article that gets accepted, you will also get a couple of links back to your website. Search engines really like this. You should see SEO as a game – always trying to get good links from good sources.
Secondly, you are also able to manually build links to your blog by commenting on blogs and so on. Some blog owners will allow you to link back to your blog with a do follow link. Do follow is the colloquial name for links that search engines will take notice of, compared to no follow links. No follow was invented because people used to pay for links to their website or spam a lot. No follow basically means search engines will ignore the link and you will not get any SEO benefit from it. Try to find some blogs that may allow you to link to your site. This benefits the SEO of your blog, increase your online presence and will allow you to network with your fellow bloggers within the blogging world. The comments ought to be genuine and relevant to the content. In most cases, writing something self-promotional (e.g.: “why not visit my home page?”) will not get approved and you will have wasted time and effort. Always try to be a productive commenter.
Furthermore, you can also use social book marking services to bookmark to your content. You should not spam your blog though, admins are good at spotting this. But similar to directories, if you bookmark your website then you will get you a link from a high quality website. If a site is well established, search engines will 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 than a smaller website.
One last tip is to add your site to online directories. They are sometimes annoying to setup but you will get a good inbound link to your site if you manage it. Many directories have high page rankings. However, submitting your site to a directory can get confusing because there are normally different submission options. There tends to be many different payment options. The three options tend to be: paid for, free with reciprocal links and free without reciprocal links. If you can pay for links (although they can be quite costly) then you will see your website fast tracked into the directory. 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). These may be beneficial for referring traffic but for SEO purposes these are not as useful.
The hints above should help your search engine rankings and improve your traffic. 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.