Search Engine Optimization

When you have done everything to promote your website, from link building to micro blogging and you still don’t get enough traffic, you know you must be doing something bad. Search engine optimization is more than just a few techniques that will increase your page ranks and it doesn’t guarantee instant traffic on your blog. A lot of people decide that SEO simply doesn’t work when it’s actually their fault; make sure that you check all the things listed bellow if you see that you are not getting the results you hoped for.

• You don’t get the right traffic – if your blog is about a certain subject and you only get uninterested visitors, there must be something wrong with the marketing. You are probably advertising in the wrong places. Quantity is not the same as quality, and you should always choose quality traffic, even if it means less traffic. Always make sure that you advertise on relevant websites; for example, if you sell baby clothes you wouldn’t want to advertise on a website about cars.
• Not enough time has passed – when you are optimizing your website for search engines, you need to give it time because you won’t be getting results immediately. Changes need to be done regularly to see what works best on your website and you should experiment with different techniques.
• Too many keywords – when your articles stop sounding relevant because of the many keywords you used, that’s not search engine optimization. How many keywords are too many? It depends on the length of your article but usually the recommended density is about 1%-3%.
• Targeting the wrong keywords – if the content on your website is not focused on the phrases and keywords people are searching for, then your work is useless in traffic terms. You won’t get any exposure and your website will not be shown on a higher position in the search results.

There are several bad things that might happen when your whole SEO technique is wrong: your website usability will be affected which will definitely not attract more visitors, you might get filtered by search engines (a lower page rank), you might get negative feedback and a lot of complaints from those visiting your website and lose credibility.

Overall, bad search engine optimization will definitely do more harm than good and ultimately you will lose a big part of your visitors and probably a big part of your income too.

Usually the basic SEO techniques are enough to help you get your site started. You don’t need to worry about all the complicated methods of making it search engine friendly right away but you can consider making some small adjustments. The most important thing about search engine optimization is understanding how the big search engines work.

Search engines send crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, to check out every site. They have the ability to record everything they read and send to the database. Like regular costumers, crawlers read from the top of the page down and from left to right; they follow the columns and when they find a link, they send another bot to see where it leads. This means that if there are sites that contain your link, search engines will be able to find your website and include it in their results. They also make connections to the type of sites that link to your site and from it; this means that the most important links will come from similar websites.

Now that you understand how a search engine gets familiar with your website, you can try to help the crawlers get around the site easier. This is done by choosing the right content and arranging it in page so that both the crawlers and the costumers can browse through it easily and get the main idea. Internal links to the most important pages should be use in the menu or just on the bottom of the page. Of course, you may have pages which you don’t want the crawlers to read and you can simply tell them that some parts of your website are off limits.

The content itself is a big part of what crawlers have to figure out. As the page layout will help them understand it better, the search terms that can be found on your site will be the ones that make the difference when costumers use the search engine. They first consider the title of the site and the heading tags as they first to get noticed by the crawlers. The description to your website must also contain keywords for a better rank but try to make it flow and not seem like just a combination of keywords. Crawlers are great at reading basic text so try to keep your content simple and to the point; this will help you get a better position in search engine results and it will also help your costumers understand better because at the end of the day, it is all about the people that visit your site and not about the bots.