Search Engine Tips & Techniques

As you are building your site or getting your site built, you need to do as much as you can to ensure higher rankings in the search engines. There are a variety of little tips and techniques you can use to do this.

Meta tags & keywords - Meta tags are included in the <HEAD> section of your site and are read by the search engines. The two most important kind are "description" and "keywords" Description is a description of the content of your site and keywords is a list of keywords relevant to the page.

Research what people are searching for and use those searches (relevant to your site) in your meta tags. A great little keyword search tool is available here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Find more great info on meta tags here:
http://www.metamend.com/search-engines-meta-tags.html

Site content - Make sure you match your site content with your meta tags. Also, keep updating your site content. Search engines love new content. Try adding articles to your site or doing a blog. Do NOT let your site get old and stale!

Blogging - A blog is basically a journal that is posted on a web site. A person who blogs is a blogger. Blogs are usually updated daily or every other day. Blogs can be used on personal or business websites. Blogs can draw a lot of targeted traffic to your site. You can create your own blog here: http://www.blogger.com/start

Site map - A site map is simply a page that lists all the links on your site. This makes it easy for the search engines to spider your site. A site map page is a good navigational tool for your visitors as well. It contains links to all important pages of your web site and it gives your visitors an overview of your web site structure all in one page. Take a look at these well designed site maps.
http://www.ireland.com/about/map/
http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

Links page - Having a quality reciprocal links page can benefit your site in several ways. First of all, it gets your site listed in more places on the net which can bring you more traffic. More and more major search engines will rank your pages higher when there are more links to your site. Also, quality links can help the spiders find you more easily each week, therefore keeping you indexed longer and dropped less frequently. Take a look here for an example of a link
exchange page. http://www.seymourproducts.com/exchange/index.shtml

Articles - Not only do you want to post relevant articles on your site, but writing and submitting them to other sites will help you as well. Posting new articles on your site will keep your content fresh and new so the spiders like your site. It will also keep your visitors coming back for more.

Writing and submitting articles can increase your link popularity and bring you more traffic as well as helping your search engine ranking. A few places to submit your articles is listed below:

http://webmarketingspecialists.com/articlesubmit.html
http://wahmteam.com/submissionform.shtml
http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/articles/submit.html
http://www.webpronews.com/submit.html
http://www.creativehomemaking.com/submit_article.shtml

Using these techniques and others will greatly improve your rankings in the search engines and bring you more targeted traffic which in turn can increase your sales substantially! For more info on search engine tactics, visit http://www.searchengines.com/

About the Author:
Terri Seymour has several years online experience and has helped many people start their own business. Visit her site at http://www.seymourproducts.com for resources, $1 ebooks & software, free tutorials, affiliate programs, and a free ezine with bonus report: 77 Ways to Get Traffic!
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