Search engine traffic has always been the best traffic that is available for absolutely nothing from your side; but for some reason many webmasters are struggling with it... So this last month I dedicated myself to reading as many articles about search engine listings as I could, how it works, and how to get the best listing. Well I’ll stop messing around now and get to the point - Here’s what I’ve learned:
There are THOUSANDS of search engines, but the biggest one is Google. Google will send your site more traffic than any other search engine out there. If you can get a good spot on Google you will get a good spot on almost every other search engine.
For the most part search engines doesn't like auto submitters, and the ones who do ensure that you wont get the same spot as you would when submitting your site manually to them. As you will never be able to submit your site to ALL of the search engines out there, try to hand submit to about 50 - 100 of the biggest ones (Yahoo, Google, Excite, etc., etc.). It will take a lot of time, but once you get into it you will do it very fast and it will be worth your time eventually.
The rest of the other, smaller search engines you can quickly and easily use an auto-submitter to submit your site to them. This should take you about 2 minutes, and you never know what might become out of it. When you auto-submit your site, remember not to submit more than 1-2 pages per week, submitting 10-20 pages from each of your domains rather than every domain once to get a better listing.
To get the best listing possible, feed your site with rich text and many fancy words. The more text the better! Try to put big text at the top of the page. The spiders like big texts, and pay attention to it more than small text. The text on the top of the page is a lot more important than text in the bottom, and putting all kind of crappy text on the bottom of the page (which many webmasters do) is a waste of time and can even get you penalized!
Try to use text ads rather than banners, but if you must put banners on your page, then remember to include ALT TAGS on all of your banners and images – this is a very important thing that many webmasters do not do! And while you’re at it, put many links to other sites on your pages, too.
Another important thing is to put keywords describing whatever your page is about in the <TITLE> tag! That is one of the most important things that webmasters can do to improve their search engine ranking, but often don't do. Spiders like titles in <H1> tags so put them up, too...
Google and all the other big search engines don't read META tags but you should put them on your pages to be on the safe side. Also if your site is full of images and graphics, the spider may come back and read the META tags, so you should always put them up if your site is full of graphics (like most pay sites, for example).
Well that's pretty much it! I hope you enjoyed this brief look at basic search engine optimization techniques, and learnt something useful from my article! Enjoy!
