Are you a walk-by website?
Is there a shop in your town or city that you walk past frequently but very rarely go into? And when you do, you just browse and not buy anything? Well this is like some websites out there and it could also be yours!
It would be nice to have visitors who come back on a regular basis making you feel like all your hard work was worthwhile. You can if you:
- Keep your site up-to-date
- Make it interesting
- Ensure it is user-friendly
Using metrics can be very helpful in giving you an idea of what kind of visitors are coming to your site and how this can be improved upon to ensure that you get repeat visitors. After all, repeat visitors means more sales and better visibility, helping your popularity and ranking in the search engines.
External Linking
When considering external links one has to take into account Search Engine Optimisation. Reading this post it may seem like common sense, but it is good to keep this sort of thing in mind when you are creating these links. When search engines crawl your site, as you know, they 'read' the text on your page to see what the content is about so they can reference you correctly in the SERPs. This can be beneficial if done correctly and damaging if not. Spending some time thinking about what sites you want to link to will help ensure your site will get the best chance in moving up through the rankings.
It’s Not Just About Google
There's more than one way to skin a cat...
In the world of the internet there are two era's. BG and AG - Before Google and After Google. I'm sure that everyone is aware of the major shift in how the internet has been perceived since Google jumped into our lives and even into the English dictionary! But there is a life outside of Google. Okay, we can all get on more than happily just standing under the Google umbrella, but there are other search engines out there and to just ignore them would (in my opinion anyway) be bad SEO.
The Ranking Of It All
I thought it might be an interesting topic to carry on from the previous one on Keyword Searches and talk about how websites got to be where they are in the search listings.
The SEO Cauldron
Throw in the correct ingredients and you will get a nice spell which you can use on the search engines to obtain high rankings (where a website is listed in the many thousands of results). Likewise, using the wrong ingredients and you risk disappointment and no one ever seeing your website from a search engine.
It is worth noting at this point that search engines, although very important in the SEO world, are not the be-all and end-all of marketing your website.
Keyword Searches
The other day I found that one of my friends hates using search engines saying that they can never understand how people can find what they are looking for when they are not able to.
This came as quite a surprise so I asked them to search for something they were interested in. It was interesting to see how they fumbled their way through using keywords and the search engines in general. So where were they going wrong? They assumed that when they had to search using keywords that they had to know specifically what they were after. This is borne of not having a great understanding of how search engines work in todays mass of information.
In the beginning...
For those who are too young to remember how search engines originally worked, you did actually need to know what you wanted to look for. This was a catch-22 situation. If you knew what you were looking for, then you didn't need to look for it. If you didn't know what you were looking for, then you wouldn't be able to look for it. You see, it all came down to the fact that webmasters were allowed to put masses of keywords into their websites - a list of words separated by commas. There never used to be anything wrong with that. It was how it worked 'back in the day'. This meant that if a website had a particular string of keywords, the information could be found but obviously it was not possible to cover every single possibility of what may be searched for.
SEO – What is it?
Any of you that have published a website online will no doubt have heard about SEO. But apart from it meaning Search Engine Optimisation, what does it actually mean for us as webmasters? In a nutshell, it is...
a practise that is employed to increase the visibility of your website through the use of methods and theories that have developed over the years to ensure high rankings within search engines.
Phew! That was a mouthfull. Let's break this down so that we can fully understand what is actually involved.
