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No matter what kind of website you may have, your ultimate goal is to bring traffic to it. Luckily, there are lots of different ways you can achieve this. In this report, you'll learn some of the most effective ways to bring eager visitors to your site. Let's take a look at the first method of driving traffic to a website, called SEO or search engine optimization.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engine optimization, commonly abbreviated as SEO, is a cornerstone to healthy website traffic. As the name suggests, this technique involves optimizing the pages of your site to garner the best search engine placement. There are many different ways you can do this. But first, it's important to understand how search engines work.

Search engines use programs that are called spiders or bots to perform a function known as crawling. After your pages have been crawled, the next step is indexing. A search engine's index is a massive database that stores all the information. When someone enters a query into a search engine, that engine then finds all the related pages that are in its index. The order, or ranking, in which the sites and pages are displayed depends on several factors.

One is relevance. The search engine will find pages that are most relevant to the terms that have been entered. This is why it's important to center your web pages around the most effective keywords, which we'll discuss shortly. The other part of the equation is 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. Now that you know a little about how a search engine works, you are ready to learn how to make your pages as attractive to these engines as possible. One way to do this is through HTML tags. Each page of your site should be centered around a particular keyword so the search engines will be able to determine if your site is relevant. There are various ways to achieve this. First, you need to determine the keyword or keywords that you want to center your pages around. One way to do this is by researching the most popular search terms with a helpful tool like the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. With a tool like this, you can enter a search term and find out how many searches there have been for that term in a month. This tool also lists related keywords and their search results as well.

Once you've figured out your keywords, it's time to insert them into your pages. When naming your individual site pages, always use the keywords you've chosen as the page title or at least as part of it. The title tag, which looks like is one of the most important tags on your entire site. Also, if you can find a domain name that includes your main keyword or words, all the better. Other places to insert your keywords include links on your page, image tags, meta tags and also in the content of your site.

However, it's important not to overload a page with a particular keyword or phrase. This can cause the search engines to designate your site as one that uses keyword spam, which can get your site shut down. To maintain a healthy keyword balance, aim for 1.5 to 3 percent keyword density.

Steve Renner, Author, Marketing Expert, Marketing Director, The Affiliate Community
http://www.affiliatecommunity.net

by Steve Renner

A Look at META Tags

Another important aspect of your site that can make a difference in your site are meta tags. There are various types of meta tags, but the ones that are most important are the meta description and meta keywords tags. Let's take a look at the meta description tag, which will look like this:

Meta Name="Description" Content="here you will put a short keyword rich description of your site"

On most search engines, the words you enter will be what gets displayed on the results page as a description of the site. Whether or not you have a good meta description can make a big difference not only in your search engine ranking, but whether or not seekers decide to visit your site. Your meta description should be descriptive, alluring, and to the point.

Now let's take a look at the meta keywords tag. This tag looks like this:

Meta Name="Keywords" Content="your various keywords will go here"

There are some important things you should know before creating your meta keywords tag. For one, your keywords should never exceed 500 characters. More than 500 characters can lower your ranking or even get you in hot water for spam. You also do not want to repeat the same keywords. Keywords should be separated with commas, and be relevant to the content of your site.

All About Content

Now let's talk a bit about site content. It's crucial that your site contains quality content that's not duplicated elsewhere. Search engines are becoming wise to duplicate content, and sites that contain it do not receive good rankings. There are several reasons why duplicate content can occur, and one of them has to do with PLR articles, or Private Label Rights articles. PLR articles are articles that are normally sold in packages, sometimes through a subscription service. The problem with these articles is that so many different webmasters have access to them. If you find yourself using PLR articles to create your site's content, it's crucial that you rewrite the articles to make them unique.

You might have seen those sites that offer free articles for use on your site. This may sound appealing, but it usually does more harm than good, because of the duplicate content issue. Most of the time, you are not allowed to change the content of these articles, making it impossible to avoid having duplicate content. These free article sites do have some benefits, however, which we'll discuss later.

On the topic of content, it cannot be stressed enough that quality content is key to good traffic. Search engines look for sites whose content is unique, of high quality, and added on a regular basis. If you're unable to add pages of content to your site each day, consider hiring a professional writer to do it for you. Good content is truly one of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for search engines and getting the traffic you desire. Plus, visitors are more likely to bookmark your site and return to it regularly if they know that the content is updated often.

You'll want to check your site thoroughly before submitting it to search engines to ensure that you have no broken links, one of the most detrimental factors to a site's ranking and popularity. You'll see on some sites that webmasters have a link where visitors can report broken links if they come across them.

Another important aspect of SEO is having a sitemap. Your sitemap page should be linked from every page of your site. In this sitemap, it should be easy to access the pages of your site. Sites that contain detailed sitemaps are normally seen as more favorable by search engines than those that do not.

Now that you've learned a bit about search engine optimization, let's look at some of the other aspects of bringing traffic to your site.

Steve Renner
Author, Marketing Expert
Marketing Director
The Affiliate Community
http://www.affiliatecommunity.net