Monday, June 8, 2009

Get Traffic With SEO Thinking

To get traffic to your website, you have to understand how Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, works. To understand SEO you need to understand how search engines work. To put it bluntly search engines have workers and thinkers, spiders and indexers. The spiders collect as many documents as they can and brings them to the indexer. The indexers ‘reads’ them and then applies an algorithm to the TEXT ONLY, very important to remember, and awards it a score in order to present only relevant search results. The key then to applying SEO effectively is to write content with this algorithm in mind.

A SEO pro could easily take days of your time to discuss the ins and outs of search engine optimization. And since the algorithms for search engines change every now and then, they might have reason to have so much to say. In my opinion SEO should not take too much of your time really, it’s always better to write compelling content for people as oppose to machines. If you remember the following 4 highlights you should do just fine in the long run.

So, mental note to self, remember the following 4 headlines:
Keyword prominence
• Proximity
• Density
• Frequency
Keyword prominence is exactly what it says; make your keywords prominent. Put them at the top of every page, put them in the titles headers and in the first paragraph of your text. Apparently it’s even important to put keywords at the start of a sentence. ‘SEO I must learn’, if you’re a Star Wars fan. If you think about it, it actually makes sense. If you have a page with ‘get traffic’ in the name, ‘get traffic in the title, and ‘get traffic’ mentioned numerously in the first paragraph, I’m guessing that the article is about getting traffic.

Keyword proximity refers to how close keywords are situated to each other. You must have heard of that age old saying: “Keywords of a feather flock together”. This should actually come pretty naturally if you’re writing about a certain subject.

Keyword frequency indicates to the search engine that you are staying on subject and that the whole article is definitely about ‘get traffic’. This again makes a lot of sense, if you have a lot of ‘get traffics’ at the start of your article and none at the end then you may have lost the plot and the search engines don’t like that. If you constantly refer to the same words then that article is probably about that subject and then relevant to the search.

Keyword density is a holistic view of your entire article and is measured as a percentage. This article is about 700 words long and ‘get traffic’ is mentioned about 10 times. That gives me a keyword density of 1.5% for the key phrase ‘get traffic’. Because spammers, and especially pornographers, have caught on to this search engines probably flag sites that have ridicules keyword densities. The recommended density for your keywords should be in the range of 3-7%. Just as a side note, words such as ‘is’, ‘our’ and ‘the’ are not counted.

As you probably noticed all 4 of these SEO factors are rather closely related. And throughout this article we only used one key phrase, being ‘get traffic’. Now imagine you had 10 keywords that you want to get ranked for. If you were too concerned about SEO, you would either write something that would make little sense to a real person, or simply considered spam. I said it once and I’ll say it again: it’s much better for your readers and your sanity just to produce good and accurate content. That’s what really gets your traffic.

So, in a nutshell, you want to remember:
• Search engines only read text, so include at least 100 words in every page text
• Use keywords at the beginning of the page, paragraphs
• Place keywords close to each other
• Repeat keywords 3-7 times for every 100 words
• Get traffic

Get more detail visit SEO Sydney..

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