Simple SEO

Websites need traffic to survive. There are many ways to get traffic to your website but the cheapest traffic comes from free search engine inclusion. Most people use a search engine to find information on the web. Are they finding your pages? Getting your pages into the top search engine results can be daunting task but it is not impossible. Here are a few things I have learned about optimizing your pages for the search engines.

Useful Unique Content

The first thing you will need is unique content that is useful to the user who will be reading it. Having unique content is very important. If you are providing content that is already out on the internet somewhere you may be penalized for duplicating someone else's pages; your pages might not even get listed in the search engine. Don't take this the wrong way though, you can create pages on the same topic as someone else but you need to be careful that you don't make them too similar. For example, there are many websites out there that provide song lyrics. If one of those sites already has the lyrics for a certain song and then you put a page up with those same lyrics, your page will not fare very well in the search engine results when someone searches for that song's lyrics. The reason why is that to the search engine it looks like all you've done is made a copy of the other site's page. For this reason, choose a topic for your pages that will allow you create loads of new, unique, useful content.

Write Content Using Keywords

When you create a new page be sure that you have some keywords in mind for that page. Think of keywords that someone would type into a search box of a search engine to find your page. Now, as you write your content, use those keywords frequently. Don't use them so much that it looks unnatural, but do use them frequently. Put some of the keywords in the title of the page and the meta description. Also, make sure that if you use the meta keywords tag that all the keywords listed in the meta keywords tab are used in the page frequently. Some webmasters try to use the meta keywords tag to magically make their page about a certain topic. The bottom line is that if you don't use those keywords in your page somewhere then you are using the meta keywords tag incorrectly. Keywords are words that describe what the content is about so they must be used in the page someplace.

Get Some Good Incoming Links

Many of the new search engine algorithms use links to determine a page's or a site's popularity and importance. The search engines think that the more links you have from other important/popular pages the more important/popular your site must be. For this reason it's a good idea to exchange links with other sites that will help you achieve a higher level of popularity. If you have unique, useful content on your pages many of these links will come naturally. If someone has found your website to be useful in some way they are more likely to link to you so that others will be able to use your site as well. Sometimes it is necessary to go out and seek for some good inbound links from other established sites. Sometimes you even have to pay for such links. Be wary of some of the sites that will want to swap links with you. Use your best judgment to determine if exchanging links with the site in question will help your popularity or destroy it.

The Human Touch

While you may find scripts out on the net that help you implement a level of SEO on your sites, they can never compare to the human touch of the webmaster. Sometimes by trying to automate things too much you can shoot yourself in the foot. Computer chosen keywords will not work all the time. Choosing keywords yourself is a better idea. Practices such as cloaking may help you in the short term but can lead to failure in the long run. One of the best pieces of advice you can follow is to avoid practices that have a spam feel to them. A search engine's greatest goal is to filter all spam pages out of their search results to make their search results as relevant as possible. So if your site uses similar practices to spam sites you will most likely run into problems in the future as the search engines become more and more strict with their spam filtering algorithms.

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science no matter what anyone tells you. Certain SEO practices may work for one website and not for another. Experiment with your pages and try new things but never put all of your eggs in one basket. If you do, you are just setting yourself up for failure. Like any good stock investor will tell you, diversify and learn from your mistakes.