SEO Basics | Finding Keywords for Your Title

The title of a page may be the single most important onpage factor that can boost your search engine rankings. When you make your webpages, make sure to include your keywords in your title. This is a must. If you don't know what you want to be ranked highly for, you won't rank highly at all.

I had seen more than fifty times "research your keywords" but have never payed attention -- until I Googled 'AngleBracket.' AngleBracket is a relatively new site, so I had expected it to be far behind in the results. But no -- this site was ranked number one -- even though it has a Pagerank of zero. The reasons? AngleBracket is in the title, and the term 'AngleBracket' has virtually no competetion.

The trick here is to come up with a bunch of keywords that will attract a small amount of visitors each, but combined, will provide a steady source of visitors.
Here's how to come up with keyword (about your page) specific enough for the SEs to rank you relatively higher. If you were looking for the kind of information that's on your page, what phrases or terms would you look for?

If you have now come up with some keywords, (in this example) "website tips," "website SEO," and "website design," and you put something like

"ABC.com | Website tips, Website SEO, and Website Design"

in your title, this not only looks unprofessional, but also, there are three unnecessary words. In this case, our keywords should be condensed to "website tips, SEO, and design."

"ABC.com | Website Tips, SEO, and Design"

The more unnecessary words there are in a title, the less 'value' each word get, therefore lowering your ranking for the more important keywords, and giving you 'useless' ranking for a way-too-general term 'website.'

This is just a tip on how to optimize your site. Make sure you do not overload your site with keywords. This is considered 'keyword spamming'; the search engines can detect it, and will actually rank your site lower... so here's one good rule of thumb for on-page optimization:

Make pages for visitors, not search engines

That way, you will keep your site natural, search engines like you, and of course, your visitors do too.

Creating the User-Friendly Website

A site with lots of CPM ads covering the face of the website means it is a high-traffic site, but what do those ads say about your website? You care more about 'revenue' than about aesthetics.

A site with lots of 'helpful' links and banners, scrolling marquees, blinking text (that works only in FF), and fancy logos and backgrounds: what do these tell about your site? You're a novice. Those add-ons don't necessarily equate with un-user-friendly; they're usually signs of web novices who don't have content for their website. When you have real content, you won't have room for those add-ons.

There are uncountable gazillions of websites on the net, with reports popping up all over say that there are thousands of new websites every day. Which of those are considered user-friendly?

Here are a few guidelines to give you an idea of what a user-friendly website should have:

1. Keep every site within one to two clicks from your home page. Not only does this make it easier to navigate, it lets the search engines index your site more easily.
2. Create a contact page with FAQs instead of giving out your email address or creating a mailto link.
3. Keep the page clear of leaks. A leak is something that distracts the visitor from what you want to achieve. If you want to capture the visitor's email address, you wouldn't put ads on the page, or the like. If your site is about, say, basketball, you wouldn't put an affiliate link to DreamHost just because it'll bring you money.
4. Make a sitemap for your website. Even if you have search on your website, you would want to make a sitemap for two reasons: 1. Sometimes people are simply 'surfing,' and not looking for anything specifically. A link to the sitemap from the website's home page would tell them what you have on your site. 2. The search engines find it easier to find and index your pages when you have a sitemap.
5. Keep the navigation in one place, i.e. don't put some navigation menus here, and some there. It's okay to have some 'featured' content like Yahoo does, because the featured content is not hard to find. The thing is, if you have some menus here and some there, the page looks very disorderly.
6. Align your page elements. I have seen pages with huge gaps on one side of the two column layout because there wasn't enough content. See, that's the problem when you have an inflexible template: it doesn't expand and shrink to fit your content. When you have such a template, make sure you add something to, uh, fill the gap.
7. Here's the rule to making the user-friendly website:

DON'T MAKE ME THINK! (Sorry Steve Krug.)

Yeah, that's the name of a great thin book that talks about web design. The book's central theme is don't make your visitors think. Don't make them look for what they need. Put the most important info where they would see it first.

Make it easy for your visitors to get around in your site, to use the features on your site. That's user-friendly.

Search AngleBracket

10 Free Ways To Get More Visitors

Here are 10 ways either to increase or get free traffic.
With these methods, you don't even have to be listed in the search engines!

NOTE: As with any and all things, do not SPAM any service. Even if the Web 2 sites have no strict Terms of use, don't take advantage; all websites are made so that their visitors will benefit. If people do things that are not good for their user's experience, they will eventually ban the activity. What would you do if you had a website and hundreds, if not thousands of webmasters are taking advantage and using your site as a free classified ads section? You get the point.

Using Forums

1. Write helpful answers in forums and use your website as your signature. Better yet, write the helpful answer in your website, mention a little bit about the answer, and link to it from the post. This is guaranteed to bring traffic.

Using Yahoo!'s Free Services

Yahoo! actually provides two extremely good sources of traffic: Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! Groups.

2. First of all, let's talk about Yahoo! Answers. Many of you are familiar with the service: it is an extremely high traffic 'forum' with just about any topic. Find the topic your site is about, write a nice answer, and say on the bottom 'Check out my site, it's got lots more helpful things in it. It's http://www.yoursitehere.com' or something similar.

3. Y! Groups is also a great way of getting the word out and also helping people. Find a group about your subject and join. When someone asks something, jump at it and quickly reply (with your website as the footer, or again, tell them the answer is on abcfg.com).

Using Free 'Viral' Advertising

4. Submit your site to LinkReferral. This is a program that does not rely on 'credits' or 'points' to show your site: this is the good part, because this means you will never 'get off the list.' Here's how it works: you visit others' sites for 'ranking' in their directory. When you review sites, your reviews will be reviewed by moderators. The better your reviews are, the higher you''l get ranked. This programs is one of the few out there that actually work for me. Join here.

5. InstantBuzz is a free ad program that utilizes a toolbar that sits on your browser to earn you credits . The credits are used as money to advertise your site (as of right now, 1 credit equals one impression).
Tip for those of you who use InstantBuzz - A report I read shows that if you advertise on Thursdays, your CTR will be highest, on Friday, the conversion rate will be highest, and ads shown on Tuesday and Wednesday have the worst percentage of clicks and conversions.
Here is the code for 100000 free credits: 167829. Click the InstantBuzz icon on the IB toolbar, and select Member's Area. Click Your Ads, then click PowerPack, enter the code, then click redeem.

6. TrafficSwarm is another viral program. You can read about it in this post

Using Web 2.0 to Promote Your Website

Web 2 is powerful. You may have used it without knowing-- del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace, and YouTube are all 'Web 2.0'. User-powered content, that is. You can use this effectively to promote your website.

7. Write a little about yourself and your website on MySpace. Include a link to your website.

8. YouTube, recently acquired by Google, generates a ton of traffic every day. In the video description, include a link to your website by typing your URL along with the http://www. into the description.
Creating a video isn't as hard as you think-- just take some videos that relate to your topic (e.g. sports sites, sports videos; money-making sites, video tutorials). Camstudio is a free software to record whats happening on you screen, and you can input audio from your microphone or your speakers.

9. Get a Squidoo Lens. A Lens is a page that lets you put content from your RSS, text, and links, and other 'modules' onto it. Another benefit of Squidoo is that it has built-in Adsense, and you can earn money from it!

10. Track your results. This really isn't another way to get more traffic, but can help you as much as the ones above. Find out which program works best for you. You can choose to use StatCounter.com to check your stats and also use multiple 'landing pages' to check where the visitors come from. Then you can focus your energy and time into that effort. For example, I would create a page called ib.html for InstantBuzz, and in IB, I would point my ad to that site. On ib.html, I would put the StatCounter and also put a Javascript redirect to my index.html. Then I would do the same for TrafficSwarm, Squidoo, and each individual forum.

Implement these free ways to get more visitors. They will NEVER work if you never use them. Don't say 'I'll use them later' either. Use them NOW.

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