Search Engine Optimization is no big mystery, and there is nothing unethical about it. Every website owner who wants to increase his or her site’s traffic (i.e., every smart website owner) should be willing to take steps to improve search engine rankings. Here are just a few ways a savvy webmaster can optimize ethically:
To make your search engine optimization work for you, consider adding more content to your website. Even businesses that require face-to-face interaction should have content on their website for potential customers to browse. This builds confidence in your customer and paints you as the authority. Quality content matters, but you should always take quantity into account as well!
Do not run afoul of the spam filters modern search engines use when you optimize your website. These filters – actually complex decision-making algorithms, analyze website content and flag pages for omission when they appear to be light on real content. To avoid this sinister fate you should limit the amount of search engine optimization tweaking you employ.
Avoid using AJAX for your most critical content. Search engines only “see” what is in the site’s code. If an AJAX call retrieves something from the server, then it will be completely invisible to search engines. If you must use AJAX, one alternative is to create a no-frills, AJAX-free version of the site that search engines can index.
Unleash the power of your URL’s, by including your site’s keywords and phrases in them. This increases the density of keywords on your web page and highlights the relevance of each component of your website. Make sure that you do not include more than three or four key-phrases in the URL. For instance, as a user, how much would you trust a URL like this: www.domain.com/pets-dogs-cats-animals-furryfriends?
Your homepage carries roughly 50 percent of the weight in searches. Up to 5 percent of your copy and links throughout the site should be weighted with keywords and phrases. This density will give depth to searches and bring your site closer to the top rankings on the major engines.
When you bid on keywords in a pay-per-click (PPC) affiliate marketing program, remember that cheaper is almost always better. Online customers are a fickle often, and it is impossible to guarantee success by buying expensive ads. It is much better to spread your budget out across lots and lots of cheap ads. More ads give you more chances to make a sale and recoup your advertising costs.
Know who you are selling to. Find out everything you can about your target market. One of the first things you should know is how many people make up your target market. You can get a good idea of this by searching your product on Google’s Free Keyword Tool. It will give you some likely keywords along with the number of people who have searched using those keywords.
There simply isn’t a website online that could not benefit from increased traffic. Optimizing a website for search engine performance is a fine way to hunt for that increased traffic. Using a few of the previous suggestions may result in immediate improvements to a website’s position on the search engine results pages.
