I have been struggling to get traffic to my blog. I have tried by making sure that my RSS feed works, and it has gone down quite a bit. I have also had trouble with my dream host servers going down, but it looks like they have fixed it so I’m very glad about that.
I’m reading a book called “Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money with SEO.”
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method that you use when you create webpages so that you will draw more traffic to your website. My coworker, Jeremy, teaches a very good class on this topic. However, I am reading the book to help me answer questions I am usually asked
I found a really good quote in the first few pages of the book:
“Most sites need to prevent breadth — many many pages that are organized cohesively. A site that presents a single webpage is unlikely to present sufficient depth of content to justify extensive SEO.”
“The SCO trick is to draw traffic with desirable content, and to ‘seduce’ the traffic into portions of the site that may not directly have anything to do with the content — this is the ultimate goal of the SEO campaign.”
Designing your Pages
Title Tag
I tell all my students that the very first thing they should do is create a page title that is relevant to the page’s content. This text goes in the head of your document.
This text would show up in the title bar of your browser.
The text from the tag also appears as the bolded link to your site when found on a Google search page.
However, if you are using Dreamweaver you will find the default title is “Untitled Document.” Google and other search engines have filtered out all pages with this title so they are not displayed with normal search results. The only way to find them is to actually do a search for “Untitled Document.”
You may be able to see there are over 39,000,000 results that were actually indexed by Google. Just think of all those ignored by Google. bad, bad…..
META tags
Add relevant META tags that make indexing your site easier. These include the description and keyword META tag types.
It is important that you add these META tags into the head of at least your primary and secondary index pages. This will help search engines find you.
Content
Be sure that you avoid high amounts of Flash or images; those can’t be indexed. Definitely, avoid a “splash page” where you don’t give information about the site, just a flash logo.
It is the content that is important in finding you. Start your page with a header 1 and then a paragraph explaining your site. Google really looks at that content. This content and the title tag are the two most important page elements for search elements.