What if you built your website, but nobody came to visit? This sounds awful. But it is the reality for many business owners. They spend money and time to build a great website, but that is not enough to make it popular or visible on the net.
What is the problem? It is actually very simple. There are millions of internet sites. You probably even have hundreds of competitors in your niche. You need your website to rank well when an internet user enters a particular search.
You need your website to rank near the top for a query when they look for the products or services you promote. If your website is buried on the third page of search results, you are not likely to get a lot of visitors. And the major search engines are very important because they deliver a lot of traffic!
I want to quickly explain the basics of search engine optimization. These examples are very simple, but should give you the basics so you can learn more. Most of us dedicate time to constantly studying this. Things change to, so if you are determined to get your pages to rank well, you need to stay current.
How do the large search engines decide how they will sort the search results. They have bots that go out and scan the web. There are a couple of important things that can help you rank.
What is your website about? Are there clear words on your pages that "tell" search engines what your site is about. This may sound simple, but many website builders have missed it. You need to make sure that you use the words or phrases on your web pages that searchers may look for.
To get found when a searcher looks for the products or searches you have, those words must be clear on your website. This is part of search engine optimization. You can find a lot of resources on this topic on the web.
The second factor is link popularity. Your website has to have backlinks (link back to you). In the best case, they will use the words you want to be found for in their linking text.
The other websites do not have to always link to your front page either. This is a common mistake. If your Red Widget website has a page on Big Red Widgets, then you want to point some links at that page too!
So you may try to get some links back to your website that point to your front page with a phrase like Red Widgets in Houston. But you should also mix this up. So some links need to use more detail when they link to your detail pages.
How do you get other websites to link to you? It is actually easier than you may think. You may start with social websites. You may participate in forums, ad you can drop a link in your profile.
Search engine optimization is not the only way to get free traffic either. But it is one factor you need to consider.
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