"Search Engine Optimization"
Important Update 3/10/06: Please read the "Old SEO" article.
*****
In this section, I'll go over advanced site design strategies to help your traffic grow through the search engines. This is known as "search engine optimization."
It's not as easy as it you to be. People use to stuff their pages with tons of keywords. Search engines would notice, and you would get plenty of traffic. Now, this is seen as web spam, and your site would get penalized.
When making a page, ask yourself this question: "Would I be open to tell Google, Yahoo, or MSN about how I designed this page?"
If you're using super sneaky tactics, you might be setting your site up for failure.
So here's some basic SEO
* Add a primary keyword in your title
* Add a primary keyword in your headers. Use the html tag H1 for main titles, and H2 for subtitles. Don't just use bigger fonts.
* Italicize or make relevant text bold.
* Include relevant keywords in your hyperlinks instead of "click here"
* For the body, type your relevant content naturally. Don't pay too much attention to the density of your keywords. Just write your article as if you weren't paying attention to SEO. Relevance is the key.
* Create a page for every keyword (based on your keyword analysis).
* Do not buy other domains and cross-link them together
* Find ways to create one-way links to your site. One way to do this is through writing articles and submitting them to article directories. A better idea is to write for online trade publications or ezines.
* Add pages constantly, not in bulk. If you had 120 articles, it's better to publish 10 each month instead of 120 in one month.
* Focus on creating pages for your visitors, not just for search engines. Make a site that has easy navigation and that can bring in people repetitively.
If you don't want to worry about optimizing your site, you can use SEO software.
You should strive for a minimum page count of 50. As time progresses, and you feel it's worth building up more, increase your site to 200 pages.
Don't just limit yourself with 200. If you're really passionate with what you're doing, keep on building.
At that level, you should expect at least $500 a month. If you're not even close, you could be offering the wrong content, bad content, or just offering too much content for the wrong market. If you've done your research and followed the steps in this guide, you should already know how good your market is.
Also, don't expect to get rich overnight. Niche content sites can take 6 months to a year to get fully indexed by all of the major the search engines that you submitted your site to.
With all of the pages you've created, you can also track how progress as well.
If you're looking for immediate traffic, you'll have to spend more to get more.
If you haven't read Part 4, I listed some other SEO strategies that you can use as well.
Good luck!
Comments