VISIBLE RANKING — ONLINE MARKETING

Make your website more search engine friendly and enhance its traffic and visibility.

Already knew about how search engines work, here are some simple but fundamental ways to increase your website traffic and its visibility.

Just because your site was indexed doesn’t mean it’s visible

The bad news: Web spiders have the capability to crawl and index all pages within your website, and depending on the complexity of your site architecture/layout, they may miss some or many pages of your site, or sometimes your entire site. The worse new: your site may get read and indexed by search engines, but it may not appear in search results – not visible at all.
The main idea about increasing your site traffic and making it more visible is to give your readers what they want / what they search for.

Search engines and text content

Search engines basically compare the TEXT [search terms, keywords, key terms] that users put in the search box against their database and give out search results. Thus, text content of your site is where you need to work on to increase your web traffic significantly. Plus, it is completely within your control, so it’s where you can start first and should spend most time on.

Notes: search engines can’t read text that’s embedded on an image because that type of text is not text – you can’t drag and select it. Text inside Flash can now be read and indexed to a certain extent but very poorly compared to html text.

Text content that can be and should be optimized for search engines

• Domain name - Domain name that contains keyword is better than the ones without
  
  
• File name - File name that has keywords may do better than the ones with only abbreviations. For example, increase-web-traffic.html would be technically and theoretically better than iwt.html. File names include .html files, text files, image files…. In brief, whatever you put on the web and want them to be well-indexed and appear in search, name them properly with keywords and key terms.
  
  
• Page title: Page title that has keywords weighs a whole lot more in search engines because the title is supposed to let readers know what your page and your site is about. Therefore, search engines always search for keywords in the title and largely decide whether to display your site in search results. Page title stands between the <TITILE></TITILE> tag.
  
  
• Page meta information: Although META TAGS such as <meta name=”description” content=”" /> and <meta name=”keywords” content=”" /> weigh less and less compared to years ago, they’re also part of the text content that should be optimized with relevant keywords and content.
  
  
• Body/main text content:
  Font style/size make a difference: Just like in print, bold, italic, and large heading text like <H1></H1>, <H2></H2> differentiate important content from the rest. Your readers notice that, and thus search engines will notice that, too, so use font style properly, and sparingly if you can.
  Keyword density counts a lot: Keyword density = how many times a certain keyword appear/repeat on the page.
  
  
• Links:
  Outbound links: links from your page to other web pages.
  Inbound links: links from other web pages to your page. Also, what words are used in the link?
  Internal links: links from within your site among your pages.

Related article: How search engines work