Banana Bulletin

Congratulations! You’ve invested valuable time and money in building and fine-tuning a beautiful website. Now, your next task is bringing people to it. Today, it’s no longer, “Build it and they will come”. It’s more like, “Optimize and promote, and they will come”. If getting your website listed #1 on all of the search engines is your top priority, then hiring a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agency to optimize and promote your site is your best bet. But, if your budget says otherwise, then here are a few things you can do yourself—for free—to increase traffic to your website.

1. Perform keyword research and write keyword-rich content that is updated often. The most effective way to boost your site’s ranking naturally is to determine the search phrases most likely to be used by prospective customers. Then, write your site content around those words. The more “information rich” your site is for those words, the higher it will rank in the search engines. And, keeping your content updated can be even more effective. Tip: Try Google Adwords, a free tool, to view the amount of traffic and competition for particular search phrases.
2. Insert search terms in Title and Meta tags. In addition to reading the visable text on a web page, search engines use text from the Title tag and Meta description tag to help them determine how to rank your site. The Title tag is usually 6-9 words, or 60-72 characters, that you see above the URL on each page. The Meta description tag is usually 20-25 words, or 200 characters, that are not visable on your website, but show up when people are determining whether or not to click on a particular search result. Make sure each Title tag and Meta tag description contain all or most of your keyword search phrases.
3. Check and increase your link popularity. Every link from one website to another is treated as a vote, though search engines weight some sites as having more “influence” or votes than others. Link popularity is one of the top criteria for most search engines, followed by the analysis of the content of the links to your site. The most critical factor in link popularity is doing the best possible job of writing your content around your keywords, using these keywords in the text of your link (vs. the typical “click here”), and creating pages that others will want to link to. Tip: Check your link popularity for free at linkpopularity.com.
4. Get listed in popular directories. Online directories are a compilation of company listings that any user can access, usually for free, when performing a search. Some directories charge a fee for including a company listing, but there are still a few that are free of charge. Perform a search on your most popular keywords to see what directories show up at the top of the search results. Now, start clicking to find out how you can list your website.
5. Register your URL with Google and other free search engines. Google has a program—Googlebot—that automatically indexes web pages (adds web pages to their search database) throughout the Internet. But, you don’t have to wait for Googlebot to find your website. Just fill out a simple form that adds your URL to the sites indexed by this program. Yahoo, MSN and other search engines have a similar service, but most, if not all charge a fee. Tip: Search Engine Watch is a great place to go for tips on how search engines and indexes work, and how to get listed on them.

Your site’s success depends upon whether people can find you on the Internet. Whether you pay to have SEO experts optimize and promote your site, or you do what you can for free, the investment will eventually pay off.

What SEO boosting tricks have you done to increase your website traffic?

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