21 Tips to Increase Your Traffic Using Search Engines

Listing your site on the various search engines is an excellent way to increase traffic. However, just listing your site on the search engines will not drive traffic to your site. To receive the greatest reward for your effort, you need to implement the proven search engine strategies included in this report.

With all the talk regarding search engines, what is a search engine? Basically, a search engine or portal is the window used to locate information on the Internet. Search engines are a great way to get free advertising. The way you get free advertising is your site will appear whenever someone searches by any of the keywords you included in your meta tags. (We learned about keywords and meta tags later in this report) The trick to getting this free advertising is positioning your site to be in the first 25 results of the search engine query. Studies have shown that sites ranking 25 or lower in query results receive dramatically less clicks from search engine results than the first two dozen. In addition, the latest GVU survey shows that 84.8% of Internet users find products and services via search engines. Search engines are a powerful way to increase your traffic.

A Quick Overview How Search Engines Work:

Search engines use a technology called "spiders". These spiders canvass the web collecting site addresses and content. This information is sent back to the search engine for indexing and storage. Some search engines index every word in a document, others index the description, while others create their own description. When someone performs a search using keywords, the database is searched and the appropriate hyperlinks are displayed.

A Brief Description How a Few of the More Popular Engines Work:

Alta Vista catalogs each page and will summarize all the words in your HTML to create a description of your page. This assumes of course, you do not have meta tags.

Excite summarizes your content and creates a brief description of your page. Excite attempts to identify a theme for your page. This portal ignores meta tags.

Yahoo operates a little different from the other search engines. Yahoo asks you for your URL, title and category. This information is verified. In Yahoo, your HTML doesn't matter.

What are Meta Tags and Keyword Listings?

Meta tags help some search engines to describe and classify your site. Meta tags are in your source code. The source code is also called the HTML code (Hyper Text Mark-Up Language) All website are constructed using HTML. Meta Tags are positioned at the top of each page in your site. Here is an example of meta tags:

<html>
<head>
<title>your title</title>
<meta name="description" content="description of your site">
<meta name="keywords" content="your keywords">
</head>

The title meta tag is the title of your site. Your title should be catchy. For example, if you have a fishing site, the title could be: Bob’s Fishing Pond. This will appear at the top of your visitors screen when they visit your site.

Some search engines display the description meta tag to someone when they search to web. Other search engines attempt to describe your site from the content. (some times this works) The description is preceded by the "blue" link (clickable word). For example, a description of a racing car site could be: Bob’s Fishing Pond – We Help you Catch the Big One.

Keywords are used by search engines someone performs a portal search. Keywords help sort your site to ensure the search engine delivers appropriate sites. For example, if you own a site that sells pet supplies, you would want to use words associated with your site and product line. Your keywords may be: pets, dog, cat, fish, leash, collar, kat-nip, and doggy bed. In addition to descriptive words, you should include any common misspellings. For example, you could include: cat, kat, dogg, dog, fish, phish, etc.

Submitting Your Site:

You should submit your sight to the hundreds of the search engines available. When submitting your site, you have two options. The first is go to each engine individually and submit your site or submit your site via submission software.

The benefit of submitting your site via submission software is saves you countless hours. With one click of a button, your site will be submitted to dozens of portals within minutes. However, the disadvantage is that you are limited to how many keywords you can include with your site submission.

Here are 21 tips to help you get the most out of your search engines listings:

#1: Compile a list of all the keywords that relate to your product or service. Once you have completed this list, twiddle it down to about 20-30 keywords. This will be your preliminary keyword list that you will submit to the search engines.

#2: Review and prioritize your list. Place your best words at the beginning of your list. The reason to do this is because some search engines only permit 15 keywords. Use your best 15.

#3: Include common word misspellings of the words on your list, too.

#4: Update your keywords every quarter. This will permit you to include any new slang words and delete old outdated ones.

#5: Use the most descriptive words possible including singular and plural words.

#6: Include the keywords in the text of your pages. This will increase your search engine ranking.

#7: Use keywords in your title. This will also increase your ranking.

#8: Review your main competitor’s keywords. This can be achieved by clicking on the view button on your browser, then click the source button. This will show you the source code for the page. Once you have the source code, view their keyword Meta Tags. If their position is higher than yours, use some of their keywords.

#9: Use Meta tags in your pages.

#10: Use a wide variety of keywords on your pages.

#11: Ask your friends, customers and family what words they would use to locate a site with your content.

#12: Use a combination of words, phrases, and statements throughout your page. The reason is that different search engines use different methods for locating your page.

#13: Limited the number of keywords on each page. Some search engines may not list your page if you have to many keywords listed.

#14: Routinely performs site checkups. You can locate free site review software on the Internet. Some of these programs will generate Meta tags and perform a complete site review at no charge. To locate these types of sites, type in “free site analysis” in your favorite search engine.

#15:Hire a professional Webmaster to review and analyze your HTML code and site. They should be able to suggest ways to improve your site.

#16: Submit each page of your site individually to the search engine. Used different keywords for each page. This will increase your site being located on the Web.

#17: If you have several pages to submit, submit them over several days. The reason, some engines only permit one or two pages per day from the same site. If you submit all of your pages in one day, you may be accused of Spamming the search engines. You’ll be banned from submitting your pages.

#18: Submit your pages manually to the more popular search engines. If you submit your pages manually, you’ll be able to use more descriptive words in your submission. Submission software limits the amount of information.

#19: Resubmit your site to the search engine every six months or so. This prevents your site from being “dropped” from the engines.

#20: Constantly review the “newly added” section of your favorite search engines. This should give you new ideas and will allow you to keep on top of the competition.

#21: Remember that it may take weeks for your site to be listed in a search engine. So allocate the necessary time in your overall marketing plan.

Use the information on this page to increase your traffic using search engines.

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