Professional Website Templates - SEO Intro

Everyone wants to know how to drive more traffic to their website, I know I do. In my information gathering phase I found a lot of tips and ideal methods to accomplish this. Some tips you'll see more traffic pretty quick and others take time mainly for search engines (Yahoo and Google) to index your site. I at least want to provide information to help guide you in getting your site indexed better and hopefully start getting on top of some of the search engines.

• First and foremost: Start off with a goal in mind. I'm not talking about "I want to have 10,000 visitors in my first month." No, I mean "What are the main search words or phrases that I need to connect with?" With this question answered before you go into your SEO campaign, you get more effective results. So, do some research, find out what your competitors are using, ask people what they would search on to find you or your services/products then start with this as you primary search word list.

I now want to touch on the technical aspects of SEO and tweaks you can do to your HTML to draw more traffic. Let me first bring out a site that I tought was very informative on this, seomoz.org. You will find a lot of information that helped me in my quest to learn more about SEO.

The following are HTML components that you can optimize to help drive more traffic. Please ignore the order that there in for it doesn't relate to the importance to an item:

• Title Tags - Title tags (within the Head tag) tell the web browser what the title of the webpage is. Search Engines use this too for their item titles. Its good practice to have your title tags relate to information on the page. For example, if your page within your site talks about Real Estate in Colorado, make sure you use Real Estate Colorado in that pages title along with maybe your site name. Again do research on your competition to see how they do it (the competition thats in the top 10 or 5 in Google or Yahoo).

• Heading <H> Tags - Heading tags are generally used to denote a header for an article or page. You have h1 - h6, so use them wisely. Search Engines do notice <h> tags and use them to understand topics on your page. Although this item isn't going to make or break your sites rankings, it will help.

• Meta Tags - Tags in the Head of a page that uses the <meta> tag have been used since day one of Search Engine Optimization. Everyone found out that these tags were the hot item back then since they greatly effected your ranking on search engines. Although you shouldn't ignore them, they have nowhere near the potency that they had before. There are different meta tags like keywords and description. Make sure your description is brief and to the point on what your site is all about since they see this description on the search engines results page.

• Alt Tags - Alt tags are basically meta information on non indexed content like images and Flash objects in your site. Since search engines can't "read" those objects, its good to have alt information (usually Dreamweaver and Frontpage has a field for alt information that you can enter) for all your unreadable content. The alt information should be relevant to the object and page its on.

• Site Maps - A lot of search engines like Google love site maps. A site map isn't just a page in HTML with all your links. Actually its an XML file that has specific coding for search engines like Google. There are some sites out there like www.softswot.com that will create these for you.

• Body Copy - Very important and often overlooked is Body Copy. Actual readable content on your page that users see and read. Since this information describes you, your site, your products, or services Google and Yahoo (and everyone else) recognizes this has an important piece on how to classify and categorize your site. Some people get way too creative in their copy and miss the actual search words from their content. Make sure you have your primary search words and phrases in your body copy.

• Anchor Links - You may notice many times that there are links to other pages within the body copy or main content of a page. These links can be more effective in SEO if the links actually have the words or phrases they link to in the link. For example, Professional Website Templates would be a link instead of click here for Professional Website Templates.

• Outside Links - Other REPUTABLE sites that link to you will help a lot. Make relationships with banners or anchor links in other sites to help drive traffic. Besides if you have information, services, and products that help them, they should be willing to put a link on their site to you. Research blogs and forums that have content relevant to yours. Don't just sell your site on them, rather offer good timely information that people would be interested in. The more links to you the better your rankings.

• Finally - When you're complete with all your HTML and coding tweaks for SEO, go though and add your site to search engine and directories index list. Both Yahoo and Google have their insertion page to be indexed. DMOZ is a great directory to be added to since they work with Google and Yahoo.

Well, I hope this helped a little in your SEO quest. Now go out there and drive some traffic!