Tips On Keeping a Traffic-Friendly Website

While any name-brand web hosting service offers Internet marketing and SEO services, there are some simple common-sense tips which anyone can follow to at least get on the radar as far as the World Wide Web is concerned. In addition, once you’re set up with the initial traffic optimization, there are things you can do to ensure that your website keeps growing. These tips will both ensure that your website appeals to both visitors and search engines alike.

Have Plenty of Content

It is very difficult to optimize a site for a search engine when there’s almost nothing on that site. And by content we usually mean *writing*. Written text is still the main thing that search engines see – after all it’s what web searchers type into Google to find your site in the first place. So remember, just images or just having Flash won’t do the job. You should at least be able to have a couple of paragraphs on a page explaining what your site is for.

Follow Internet Standards

Search engines prefer to crawl sites which adhere to standards. While it is difficult to have a site be 100% in compliance, the better you follow good mark-up standards, the better. Check your HTML, XHTML, CSS, and RSS with the relevant W3C services, and check back periodically to make sure that your site is still easy for search engines to navigate.

Important Elements

· Title – put the title of each web page between the title tags in the head section of your HTML.

· Meta tags – At least a couple of these can make a difference. Using “description” and “keywords” helps some search engines and directories index your content and categorize it better.

· Link internally – We cannot stress enough, all of your website’s individual pages must be accessible from a hypertext link on at least one other page. Text links are better than image buttons, and descriptive linking text is better than “click here”.

· Headers matter – Use the header tags (h1 through h6) to display the name of your page and the relevant sub-sections within the page. For instance, if you are running a car-buyer’s directory, the listing of cars should have something like “Cars for Sale” in the h1 tag at the top, followed by “Ford”, “Chevy”, “Saturn”, etc. in h3 tags.

Blogs

Blogs have a huge advantage in getting search engine traffic. They provide lots of text for a search engine to scan. They are updated regularly, so fresh content keeps bringing in a new audience. Their layout makes it easy to sort subjects by category. And all blog software generates an RSS feed, which visitors can collect into a feed reader and track new changes to your site from there. Get a blog and keep it fresh, and you almost can’t go wrong.

Be Selective in Your Friends

By this we mean that you are risking your good standing with Google and other search engines if you participate in shady marketing schemes. If you link to a lot of sites which are blacklisted by search engines, pretty soon your name will be on that list, too. Follow search engine’s webmaster’s guidelines for good conduct – it’s not hard to follow some common sense rules.

Market Yourself

Every day that you have a website, you should be thinking of what you can do to promote your website. Do all of your business partners and family know about it? Are you joining social media like Facebook, Twitter, Meebo, or MySpace, and if so is your website in your profile? And while you shouldn’t link-spam your site to social news websites, it is perfectly acceptable to post a link to a section of your site if it’s particularly relevant to a forum topic. You can also submit your site to any directories you find online that would have something to do with your website’s focus.

Following the above guidelines should put you at what we call “natural traffic”, the ambient level of traffic that any average site should have. SEO optimization and marketing services are then better prepared to help boost you far above average.

Peter Brittain