How to Increase Traffic Through Search Engines

Here are some tips, and basic unwritten laws, on what to use and avoid when designing your website. Using these website traffic tips and tactics will increase your websites usability and will actually help your website rank better in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Getting to page one on Google will be very beneficial in increasing website traffic, as this is how most traffic is generated.

The following information is from Tips for Web Traffic. We suggest visiting this website for more tips and advice for internet marketing and increasing website traffic.

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should…

• Avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your website because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your website without using long, complicated scripts.

• Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

• Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your website so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your website more frequently.

• Use ALT tags for your images to allow search engines to understand what the image is. Like flash and movies, search engines cannot read images. In order for us to tell the search engine what the image is or where the image links to, we use ALT tags.

• Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load. Using tags such as <H1>,<H2>, <STRONG>, and <BLOCKQUOTE> can greatly increase your chances of being found through a search engine.

• A text based navigation is a key factor when creating your website for SEO. Search engines read text, and text alone. As previously stated, search engines do not read images. A text base navigation can “make or break” your website when dealing with search engines.

• All websites must be linked together well and have a good internal linking structure. Search engines use crawlers and robots to search through your pages and store the information in a cache for later use. Without a good internal linking structure, you might as well only make half of a website because that is all the search engine may be able to find.

Use an XML sitemap for your website. A sitemap allows a search engine to browse through every page on your website, leaving no page unaccounted for