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Introduction:
No matter what kind of website you may have, your ultimate goal is to bring good quality targeted traffic to it and as much as possible. There are lots of different ways you can achieve this on a very limited budget. In this eBook report, you'll learn some of the most effective ways to bring visitors to your site and elevate your site's visibility on the world wide web. The first step in bringing traffic to any website, is optimizing the site itself, all other efforts will be rendered less effective if the site is not properly constructed with search engine friendly navigation links and with content that has an optimum density of relevant keywords. When it is considered that studies have shown that up to 80% of web traffic comes from search engines, preparing your website to make the job of search engines easier just makes good sense.
There is no magic bullet, no easy route to gleaning mega traffic and all efforts must be above board. Attempting to fool the search engines is in one word foolish. Once a site is blacklisted, the effort to have it re-indexed can be tenfold the effort of just doing it right from the outset. All strategies outlined in this report are considered search engine compliant. As we are not going to be dealing with actual website creation in this report, we must assume that your web site is constructed properly. If you are still at the website construction stage, it is worth stopping into the MSN Small Business Pages for a few tips on what problems not to build into your web pages: Avoid Website Design Problems. In this eBook report we will be covering, or providing resources for: the use of keywords, their relevance to site content, basic SEO strategies and the best ways to set up your site navigation links to be search engine friendly. Then once this work is all completed we will lead you to some useful promotional resources and places to leave your website URL for the search engine spiders to find it.
Keyword Research: The most important and first order of business
Keyword research must be undertaken from the outset and should remain ongoing as all SEO strategies, including your linking strategy will rely on using important niche keywords and keyword phrases. This topic is covered throughout this eBook report and encapsulated on PAGE FIVE but to quickly summarize why it is mentioned at the outset is because utilizing your keywords in the construction of your website and the creation of its content is vitally important.
Robots Text File (robots.txt): One of the first tasks
Mentioned earlier is the fact that the vast majority of web traffic is delivered to web sites via search engine search results. Search engines briefly; are software programs that send out invisible "spiders" or "bots" (short for "robots") to crawl web sites on the world wide web. These little veracious cybor creatures will follow each and every link they encounter, returning the information they glean from their travels to a massive data base to be stored and indexed. The point of this is so that this information can be immediately returned when someone initiates a search query. Assuming that you have control of your web space and are not attempting to promote a blog or web site that is on a subdomain, the very first step is to place a properly filled out Robots Text file (robots.txt) in your site's web root. A good article and instructions on how to do this can be found: Robots Text Files This is merely an invitation of sorts for the search engine spiders and also allows you to give them rudimentary directions if there is a portion of your web site that you do not want them to index.
Sitemap Text File (sitemap.txt):
Again placed in the web root, it is simply prudent to begin a sitemap.txt file as you lay out and construct your website. The proper structure for it can be seen in the following example:
http://www.yoursitename/com/index.html
http://www.yoursitename/com/about.html
http://www.yoursitename/com/services.html
You will notice that the full URL to each web page, including the domain name is used and that each URL is on a separate line in the text file. Why it is important to do this in the beginning stages of constructing your website is simply a matter of practicality. A great number of search engines use the sitemap.txt format (Including Yahoo), it can be used in conjunction with other sitemap formats and it provides a handy list of all of your website URLs when the time comes to construct sitemap pages in other formats. More About Site Maps: Once a website grows to point beyond a few web pages it is time to consider putting more sophisticated site maps in place. There are a number of formats that you can use, smaller web sites of a dozen to a few dozen pages can use a simple HTML unordered list format, an example including source code can be found: HTML Site Maps HTML format Site Maps will be used by search engine spiders and human visitors alike. Google uses XML format while Yahoo uses text format site maps. Fortunately there are online utilities that will auto-generate both formats for your website as found: XML Site Maps
Demystifying Search Engines:
When someone enters a search query into a search engine, that engine then finds and returns all the related pages that are in its index. The order in which the pages are returned (ranking) and displayed depends on several factors which the search engines weight against each other. The most important criteria is relevance. Any search engine will find pages that are most relevant to the search term or keywords that have been entered. Drawing upon two important databases to find this information. The paid inclusion or Pay Per Click database and the search engine constructed index database which has been assembled by diligence on the part of the search engine itself. Most search engine results pages are separated into paid or sponsored listings, which surround free or organic listings. We are concentrating on the latter, the free or organic listings derived from the search engine's index database. This is why it's important to center your web pages around the most effective keywords, which we'll discuss shortly. The other most important part of the equation is link popularity. How popular your site is will depend on how many backlinks you have pointing to your site. The more links you have with other quality sites, the higher your site's popularity will be to a search engine. These two criteria are by far the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a website, there are other vital aspects to ranking high in organic (free) search and they are important to address as well but these two are the biggies. Writing or re-writing the content of your site to make it relevant to search queries that are pertinent to your site's theme is a critically important early step in preparing your website. The ultimate goal of SEO efforts is to come up on the first page of search results for your desired keywords. There are only so many spots on the first pages of organic search results so you can bet that the authors of the sites that do show up on the first page have done their homework. There is no escaping the effort of doing the necessary diligence.
Search Engine Spider Friendly Links:
It will be mentioned numerous times within this eBook report that search engine spiders love text links. This is true for all links they encounter including site navigation links. Notice how the navigation in this eBook report is set up, images are used sparingly for navigation and only for secondary or complimentary navigation. All mouseover and current page effects are done through the eBook's stylesheet, primary site navigation is comprised of clean text links. Where the navigation of an eBook may not have the same guidelines as that of a website, constructing navigation links this way is a good habit to get into. A good article can be found on links here: Search Engine Friendly Links
 
Internal Link Directory
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