How to draw traffic to your website using SEO

While working on my previous company I came across this concept called Search engine optimization (SEO). This was a new concept to me at that time and I did a lot of researching and gathered information on that.

Search engines are a very important source of quality traffic for web based companies. But if your site is not ranked high enough on the search engines (e.g. after the third page of the search result), none of that traffic will come to you. Another great way to attract targeted traffic is through Pay-Per-Click Search Engines.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of preparing your website so that search engines can better understand its content and/or purpose. To get listed correctly in the search engines each page of your site needs to be optimized. Your site must be focused on the content, products, or services you provide. Keywords used in the content are very important to have a high rank in search engines.
Here are some traditional places to keep keywords,

Use specific keyword phrases,
  1. in the domain name

  2. in the file name

  3. in the Title tag

  4. in the Meta description tag

  5. in the Meta keyword tag or in the image alt attributes

  6. in an H1 (or any H) tag

  7. as the first words on the page

  8. in bold and/or italics or a different color

  9. multiple times in the first paragraph or twice on the page

  10. in the copy in every single spot on the page where it might possibly make sense to use it, and

  11. in all the hyperlinks pointing to a page.

Google is one such search engine in which most users do keywords searching. But there is something you need to keep in mind. Google is constantly changing their ranking criteria because of search engine spam. If you put the same keyword phrase in many of those spots, you might very well trigger a spam filter which is not good for the long run of your site. Therefore the best advice I can give you is to do your SEO without any particular formula in mind.

Google’s PageRank algorithm tests to see how often a web page is updated and the length of time between changes in content. Access the below URL to read more on page rankings.
http://www.highrankings.com/linkpopularity

In order to make your site crawler friendly you need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Sitemap does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Reference : http://www.highrankings.com/optimization.htm
                 http://www.sitemaps.org

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