Generating Targeted Traffic with SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving your website to achieve a higher ranking on various search engines. It’s a simple concept that requires, above all else, consistency and expansion. Be persistent. Search engines send out indexing spiders to “crawl” your web page in search of new / changed content. Most search engines will rate your page upward every time they “crawl” something new on your page. Consistently adding new pages and updating new ones will raise your rank slowly over time. Search engines for the most part will pick up your page automatically over time.

However some require you to pay to be indexed, the best example of this is Yahoo!. How do the rankings work? Most search engines, once you are indexed, automatically rank you upward or downward for specific search terms based on how often you update or expand. However, some engines, such as Google will rank your page upward based on how many other pages that are indexed link to your page. What’s a meta tag anyways? A meta-tag is your best friend and worst nightmare depending on how you use them. Search engine spiders identify your meta tags, or keywords, and search for them on the according page. If you have a keyword that is not present on the same same, most search engines will rank you negatively.

A general rule of thumb is to write your article first, then go back and add keywords accordingly. Update update update! Spiders absolutely love updates. They wish to wrap them in a cocoon of high ranked search engine silk. And at least in this metaphor that’s a good thing. Keeping your current pages updated while (depending on the type of website) archiving the old ones is a very solid strategy for SEO. The spiders will give you double points for this. One for the updated original page, and one for adding a new one to your archives. Google is a bit trickier to get a higher ranking on.

Using all the above certainly helps, but you need to make friends with as many other websites as you can. Forums are also a great spot to get your Google ranking up. But in general, once you get your ranking up on all the smaller search engines, your Google rank will come naturally. Assuming you link your site around as much as you can legitimately. Make a plan and stick to it. Be consistent as possible, and above all else don’t spam your website around the internet. Search engines will drop you if you abuse their system, and then there is no hope for your site. Just be legit, consistent and expand. The rankings will come.