I read a post today from someone who’s experienced the frustration of focusing on the Search Engines for their website traffic.
The problem is – the search engines keep changing their algorithms in order to improve the relevance of their results and to block loopholes the black-hatters find. And this can really blow your search engine rankings.
I had the same experience 18 months ago when I was depending on PPC via Adwords for my traffic: the Adwords algorithms were changed every couple of months (or more often) which often completely screwed up my campaigns. Extremely frustrating.
So I stopped relying on Adwords and looked for other ways of getting traffic. And gradually my traffic is building up and remaining consistent – meaning that it’s resistant to changes in the search engine algorithms.
Although I’m by no means an SEO wizard, I now follow 10 basic rules for every site I put up. And they seem to work – for me, at any rate! Here they are:
- Complete all your META tags – individually for each page
- Create a sitemap and submit it to Google. Remember to create and submit a new one each time you add or remove a page
- Use your H1 and H2’s properly and include your keywords or closely related words in each.
- Avoid flash and scripts as far as possible
- Use CSS with an external stylesheet
- Run a PHP based RSS feed on an ‘articles’ or ‘news’ page – making sure the content it pulls in is totally relevant. (PHP based because the SE’s can read it – they can’t read java based ones)
- For every image link also include a text link with good anchor text
- Complete all ‘alt’ tags for all images.
- Link to it from wherever possible (Squidoo, Hubpages, your blogs, profiles on the Social sites, etc)
- That’s it.
For a new site I sometimes set up a small PPC campaign to get things going but once I’m getting the same amount of traffic from the natural search results as from the PPC I can the PPC campaign.
Cheers,
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Ive done all of the above, but there is one big enemy – Google, and it’s tactics changes frequently, so there is no so easy to get Consistent traffic
Kate, hi,
Sorry to hear you’re having problems. On re-reading this post I realise I left out one extremely important element: content.
Google can sometimes seem like the webmaster’s enemy, and I certainly felt that way when I was struggling with Adwords 18 months ago.
But Google’s mission is to serve searchers – not webmasters. They’re very clear about that.
And to do that they continually strive to provide the most relevant results to searchers.
In addition to the factors I set out above, the one thing that wins out is tightly focused content. Google will present sites on which the content is most relevant to what the searcher typed in.
Those 10 steps above make it easier for the search engines to find your site, to understand what’s on it and to find their way around it, but content is what will get you the traffic.
If you can fill your site with high quality content Google will eventually become your friend!
Cheers,
Martin.
nice,, i agree a lot with you
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