Search Engine Optimization

One of the best ways to make your website search engine friendly is to get a decent amount of regular traffic to your website. Creative and optimal ways must be implemented in order to gain attention from today’s sophisticated internet users. While there are monetary ways to increase a site’s traffic, there are also free traffic generators. If planned well and creatively, these free channels can result in more sales and revenue than those which are monetized.

A first step of vital importance is to increase the online presence of your website. You can start to do this by maximizing the quantity of the content on the website, always keeping in mind how important high quality is to draw readers because you provide unique and free content. Because your content is unique, user searches will narrow it to very relevant terms, and that will increase traffic in your niche.

The next step is to work on backlinks to your website by offering contents that are compelling enough that other sites will want to cite your work or link to it. Focus your content most on keywords that you want your website to rank highly for on the popular search engines, keeping in mind that a longer and less general keyword might bring more traffic than a very general and broad keyword which has lots of competition. Use your site’s meta tags to provide the search engines an easy way of indexing your       content. Be sure to provide a sitemap on your website also, which will help to improve your page rank.

Other than links, there are ways to advertise your website online that are simple and free. Participate in forums and include an anchor link to your site. Submit articles to the directories and blogs with a link to your home page. Additionally, advertising can also be done off-line, in newspapers, local magazines, and coupon clipper publications. Depending upon your business, you can figure out which off-line channels are best to help with traffic.

Be sure that your website has simple, user-friendly navigation tools so that they can find their way around. Visitors that feel your website is too difficult to navigate likely will never return, nor explore your site beyond the home page. Interactive scripts seem to drive lots of traffic and keep visitors returning to websites, so you might add one to your site. Use readable fonts and backgrounds that are attractive.

Another great way to increase the number of visitors to your website is to share some posts from it in  social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The number of users on both of these sites is very high, and the conversion rates are high as well. What this means for you is that the probability of someone reading about your site and then visiting it will be high as well.

Most SEO professionals realize the importance of links to their sites, and work diligently to get lots of the ‘right’ type of links (to relevant, in-niche sites) on their blogs and websites.

The number of links placed on any particular page has been a source of great debate among SEO pros for some time. Typically, the maximum number of hyperlinks that SEO masters like to see on a page is 100. It seems to be based on some Google sources, and even in 2009 Matt Cutts quoted Google’s guidelines, which say to keep the links on each page reasonable (fewer than 100.) Also according to Google, this has never been a hard and fast rule and should not garner any penalties.

This limit seems to have been imposed due to the amount of data that could be processed by the early crawlers because of bandwidth limitations at the time. At that time, Google probably started ignoring links after the 100 links point.

A review of Google’s guidelines today will show that the “fewer than 100” phrase has been removed. It seems that if a page has lots of good and informative links, Google is still interested even if the page has more than 100 links. In other words, like many of Google’s guidelines, it depends on the site’s Page Rank, and therefore, its authority.

However, more links can dilute the Page Rank passed on to the internal pages, and to pages that the links point to since the amount of PR the page has is divided by the number of links on that page.

How many links should a page have?

Because the question is very complex, based on complicated Page Rank math, there is no one correct answer. A balance of building a site structure that is not too deep, and having enough links to pass PR from is important. A flat architecture that has many pages far removed from high-authority page links means that each page gets equal link and PR treatment. The problem is that most sites put their most important message up front, and the following pages are truly of less importance.

Therefore, focusing the site’s internal Page Rank on the important pages up front first will give the site a balanced approach, with the most links on the first few pages. As far as the 100 links per page number, it probably is still a good rule of thumb for most sites