How to increase traffic from search engines

by Owen Mundy, September 18th, 2004

After you make your website live, you'll want it to appear on search engines like Google when people search for your name or other related text. Search engines learn about content on the web by "indexing" content they find by following links. So the more links to your website then the more likely it will be indexed by a search engine and then found using their search tool. This is why they can return queries so quickly, since they have in effect already looked for it for you!

Given the above, it is important to have lots of text on your website that search engines can index. Therefore it is not advisable to embed text into images or create your whole website with Flash. The general rule is, if you can't highlight and copy the text then the search engine cannot index it.

In addition to the above I'm going to explain how to add description and keyword meta tags to your pages to help to give search engines a better idea of what kinds of content can be found on your site.

Below you see the description and keywords tags with content. Add these tags to your html pages between the <head></head> tags with appropriate descriptions and keywords. View the source for this page for a finished example.

Here is what it looks like:

<html>
<head>
<title>This is the title of your website</title>

<meta name="description" content="yourarthere.net provides web hosting for artists, musicians, and art organizations.">

<meta name="keywords" content="Your Art Here, artist web host, artist website hosting, web host for artists, art web hosting, best art web hosting, web host, web hosting, web server, art, artists, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, video, performance, musicians, organizations">

</head>

<body>

The content of your web page.

</body>

</html>

Also, if you think someone may search for your name under a different spelling then you should add the usual wrong spellings too. Here's an example: "Alyssa Hill" (correct) | "Allissa Hill" (incorrect) | "Alisa Hill" (incorrect). This will still bring visitors to your site who are looking for your name, they just don't know how to spell it. Don't worry, you can straighten them out once they get to your site, the trick is to get them there in the first place.

After that, go here and submit your site to Google. You really don't have to worry about other search engines. Many of them use Google's listings or have such a small market share that it's not worth bothering. With that, don't consider ever paying for Search Engine Optimization or SEO services, there's nothing they add that you can't do already by following instructions on this page.