SEO -Search Engine Optimization

What you can do to help your SEO.

Hopefully, you have already read the page Where are all my visitors?
If you have not, we will go over the key points briefly in this article.
Websites are constant work. Anybody who tells you they had instant success with a website is either lying or put a really large investment into it. Many people get frustrated with the slow build up of traffic to their site.
A website which is started, published and never touched again, will after roughly 6 months get 10-20 visitors a day on average.
If your website is your business, that is not much traffic at all. Especially since only about 1 of those visitors might choose to purchase something.
The time and effort it takes to build a steady flow of website traffic is much more than many people are expecting when they first start a website. Here we are going to show you just a few things you can do to get your website higher in the search engines so you have a greater chance of attracting visitors.

1. Register your domain name for as long as possible. (Currently 10 years is the maximum amount of time.)
2. Avoid building your site using Flash or PHP. In the future search engine systems may be able to integrate this information, but currently Google bots are unable to effectively handle Flash or Dynamic PHP.
3. Create a Site Map. This helps search engines find all of your pages.
4. Submit your website to the search engines. Don't wait months for them to find you. Almost every search engine will allow you to submit your website to them for free.
5. "Content is King" is a popular SEO phrase. What it means is, the more information you have on your website, the more search engines can pull to match your site with search requests. Search engines also try to discard sites that have the same content, so make your site unique.
6. Google treats websites like a popularity contest. Networking is essential. DO NOT go out and purchase links. This can, in the end, have an adverse effect on your search engine ranking. Instead hand submit your website to various directories, ask websites with similar content to exchange links with you.
7. Meta tags. Make use of the meta tags in your html code. There are 2 the search engines look at for ranking. Keywords and Description. Make sure to use these if you know how to edit html code. A NOTE OF CAUTION!! Make sure that you only use 3-5 keywords at most. Search engines watch for keyword stuffing. The keywords should appear on the content of that page at least twice to be viable keywords.
Meta Tags should be in the head area of your code. The format looks like this:
<meta name="description" content="SEO -Search Engine Optimization on your own.">
<meta name="keywords" content="SEO, Search Engine Optimization ">
Each keyword is separated by a ,
8. Don't let your images do all the talking. Bots have problems with images too. You can help bots determine the content of images though.
In your html code, be sure to use an alt tag. This is a text tag that will show up in its place if the image can not be loaded. It also provides search engines with information.
The format for alt tag images looks like this:
<img src="internet.jpg" width="600" height="200" alt="internet">
Notice the alt="description of image"
9. Title tags. This gives the web page a title in a user's browser. You can see the title of this page in the very top upper left of the window. If you are using tabs, it will appear in the tab as well.
This is another html code edit. The title tag should also be in the head section and looks like this:
<title>SEO -Search Engine Optimization</title>
10. Add a forum, blog, and/or RSS feed to your site. Not only is this a form of interactivity to interest your website visitors, but helps you to keep your content fresh.
Search engines look for new content. When a site stops progressing by adding new content, it will drop in the search engine ranks.
Forums allow your users to log in and create new content for your site by making new posts. It also helps them to feel involved and part of a community.
Blogs allow you to make small updates about whatever. Could be news about the industry you represent, about the employees that in your place of employment, or anything really. This keeps new content added to your site without changing the core pages and allows people to be on a more personal level with you and your company.
RSS feeds can be anything as well. Many people use reliable news sources from the industry they represent.
11. Time, work, and patience. It takes all of these, don't expect an over night success. By Following these tips, you can make your website more search engine friendly and earn a higher ranking.