Ten Tips for Directing Organic SEO/SEM Traffic to Your Site

Ten Tips for Directing Organic SEO/SEM Traffic to Your Site

1. Keyword research: Take the time to figure out the words used by people you want to visit your site, and use these words in articles and other content on the relevant page. Make sure you use these keywords in the first few words of your page title.

2. Get trustworthy advice from SEO sources.

3. Maintain your code: Build a website that is easy for the search engines to understand.

4. Make navigation easy: Build clear text links (or a menu) to all parts of your site. Search engines can’t follow image links or clever animated links like Flash; they like their navigation plain and simple.

5. Get trusted, relevant links: Links are like a vote for your site and you can’t rank well without them. Buying links or being indiscriminate in the places you link to and places you request links from, is a bad, temporary, spammy way to raise the importance of your site. Links must be relevant to the content of your site and they must be from reputable websites.

6. Build a sitemap: Sitemaps help search engines discover every page in your website. If you have too many pages on your site, create as many sitemaps as you need and link them.

7. Don’t forget the technical stuff: Technical stuff happening in the background on your site can cause problems with the way the search engines see your site. Does your website use tech that search engines don’t like, like certain types of redirection? If in doubt, ask your SEO/SEM master.

8. Track your progress with a web analytics program: Google Analytics is easy to use, versatile and it’s free. These analytics can tell you a great deal about how people interact with your site and the traffic that search engines are sending you.

9. Tell search engines where you are: Submit your site details to search engines. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have a facility to submit a list of all the pages in your site.

10. Content is king: Build great content and keep it up to date. This is the key to good SEO; search engines love sites like blogs, which are topical and regularly updated.