SEO for more web traffic

I've been trying to draw in more traffic to my site recently (it's been online about 4 years and still not reached 10,000 hits), and reading a lot about Search Engine Optimisation - SEO, a must-know topic if you want people to find your site in Google and other major search engines.

So what have I learned? There are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is what you do to the content of your website to make it "search-engine friendly", such as optimising certain keywords, and making sure these keywords appear in the right amounts in the right places on your page. Off-page SEO is how you increase your site's page ranking by getting more high-ranked sites to link back to your site. The more links to your site, the higher your page will rank in Google.

Sounds pretty simple, but there are many pitfalls to beware of. The initial step of choosing which keywords to optimise for is probably the most important decision you will make. Too popular and there will be far too much competition. Too obscure and nobody will ever find your site. Once you've figured out your keywords and integrated them into your content, you need to set about finding sites to exchange links with. There are many link exchange services out there, such as www.linkmetro.com which can help you find related sites wanting to exchange (links from related sites rank higher than random links), and if you can get high-ranking sites to link to you without having to link back to them, all the better (one-way links are ranked higher than reciprocal links).

So, if you can manage all that, and get a good collection of backlinks together, you will surely see your page climbing the rankings. I noticed recently that a Google search for "Bruce Lee caricature" lists my site in the top 30, and a search for my name "Dan Johnson" shows my site in the top 20!

Tags: SEO |optimisation |Google |keywords |link exchange |drawmyface