Introduction So you hav.completed your website, great! Now how are you going to attract visitors? If you do not let them know you're there, your visitors will never find find you. How are you going to sell products when users don't know that you exist? SEO
will make your website noticeable on the internet, and this small guide will help you bring targeted visitors to your website.
Optimize your website The most important part of your website is quality content. Search engines (such as google) will crawl your content and index it into a database. If your content does not match the product you are selling, you will not attract targeted visitors. It is therefore very important that you choose your (key)words very carefully. For instance, if you sell calculators on the internet, make sure you mention the words calculator, calc, math and more calculator related words on your website. However, be careful not to mention the words too often, or search engines might think your website is spam, which will result in a very low rank (search engine position) within the search results.
Linkbuilding When more websites link to your site, the more attention you will get from search engines, which results in higher ranking. When you create and receive links from other websites to your website, make sure important keywords are used as anchor keywords in the hyperlink. If you sell calculators online, use a link such as, "buy calculator" instead of "click here".
Target your audience Leave your link on website where your potential customers meet, for instance forums or discussion boards related to your website. Do not spam your website as this will be noticed by crawlers and will eventually result in a blacklist entry.
Offline targeting Be sure to market your website offline as well. Advertise in local newspapers, tell everyone about your website, etc.
Add a sitemap to your website When you want search engines to crawl your entire website, the best thing to do is adding a sitemap to your website.
Make sure searchbots can read your website Searchbots can only read plain text.websites. No matter how beautiful your flash animation is, searchbots cannot read the content inside that animation. Therefore, try to avoid Flash animations on your website when there is content involved. Same story goes for JavaScript.
Do NOT use frames Never use frames to design your website! Lots of search engines simply skip webpages with frames since they are a difficult to be seen apart from each other by visitors. For instance, if your framepage would consist of menu.html and content.html and your visitor would land on content.html, he would not have a menu to navigate through your website.
Stay away from bad neighbourhoods and don't spam! Do not be tempted into leaving your link on abandonned guestbooks, forums or spam your link on every website you can find. Do not exchange links with spammy websites (such as pharmacy websites) either. The risk exists that google will classify your website as a spamsite and will block your website from any search results.
Jaap van de Wal is co-owner of
business-web.org Business-Web.org and guides people in setting up a full business website. Business-Web allows users to set up their online business without needing to know anything about HTML or webdesigning.
