Search Engine Optimization

Gaining repeat visitors

Repeat visitors are the best visitors you can get. If you have adverts on your site the more times they come back, the more they see your adverts and the higher chance you have of them clicking on an advert and buying. Confidence is trust and once a visitor has trust in your site they will take notice your endorsements and consequently buy whatever your promoting.

Repeat visitors rock because they promote your site for you. Yes that's right, they promote your site for you. If your site is good enough to gain repeat visitors they will spread the word about you. People underestimate the power of viral marketing. Not only that, they will post links to your site in there blogs, personal sites or on forums or chat rooms. Not only getting you more traffic but building your link popularity as well.

Now we had identified why repeat visitors are gold when it comes to website success. We now need to find different ways to gain these repeat visitors. The most simple way is to have good and unique website content that cannot be found anywhere else. You don't have to be a fantastic writer (hell I'm not) but if you have something to offer that cannot be found anywhere else people are sure to come back to check it out.

Update often, if you are writing articles for your website, updates don't have to be everyday but at least once a week. That way visitors comeback and have fresh content to read. If your not up for writing full length articles starting a blog could be a good idea. If your unfamiliar with blogs check out blogger. There service is great, I run all my blogs using blogger !

The secret to repeat visitors

This is simple and I use it for all my websites and ventures, providing your interested in the topic your website is about you cannot fail. The secret is, build the website for yourself. Try to think of all the other websites that you visit in your chosen topic and think of the things that bring you back to those websites. Try to incorporate all of these things into your site without copying and basically design the ultimate user experience, make the ultimate site for your niche and people will come to your page first.

Google pagerank basics

You may be aware of page rank by now. In its simplest form pagerank is a way of ranking pages against each other according to the quality and quantity of incoming links. It's kind of like an online popularity contest. Where pages with the most incoming links get assigned a higher page rank which then correlates to higher positions in the serps. Page rank can be seen on the google toolbar, it is measured from a value of 0-10.

You should also pay attention to the number of links on the page that has linked you. Page rank is shared equally between all the outgoing links. If you get linked from a page that has 10 outgoing links and a page that has 100 outgoing links. The page with only 10 outgoing links will most likely pass more pagerank onto your page as there are less sources to split the pagerank between.

In summary your pagerank is determined by the following:

Number of links pointing into your page
Number of links on the site that is linking to your page
The pagerank of the sites linking to you
(indirect) Number of outgoing links to your internal pages compared to ratio of outgoing links. IE more pagerank passed onto your internal pages and then more pagerank returned to you providing a good linking structure.

On page optimization

In my previous post I said that content is king and listed a whole bunch of reasons why its rocks. However,I did leave out half the picture. Yes content is essential, but if you poorly optimize your content you will not get enough out of your efforts. So in order to gain top search engine placement I have outlined the following sheet of information regarding on page optimization:

Meta tags are a thing of the past - I still get newbies asking me about meta tags and my answer is the same every time.... "Meta tags suck" Its a fact that google doesn't use them. Yahoo may still use them in there algorithm but I have tested it and I have noticed no difference in my rankings on pages with and without meta tags.
Use h1 tags - Make sure the title of your page is located within a h1 tag. Every search engine puts weight on headers. It basically tells them what your page is about and sets the theme for what there bots look for.
100 words + of text per page. Although with extreme link popularity it is possible to get a page without much text a high ranking, a good thick body of text helps everyone in there quest for search engine glory.
To get good on page optimization you can bold and italic words within your page. Be careful not to overdo this. The amount this contributes to your ranking is thought to be small but helps a little.
Use alt tags to describe images
Write for your viewers not search engine bots

Content is king

If you have read into search engine optimization before you will have most probably found out that content is king... In my opinion far too much emphasis is given to optimizing ones page and gaining link popularity. A lot of people forget that if you have fantastic content people will naturally link to you out the kindness of there heart.

That's why when making a new page you should start with the content, if you have no content why would someone want to link you in the first place. Spending money on buying text link ads in my opinion is a waste of money. Anything that tries to trick the search engine into giving you a better rank probably won't benefit you in the long run. Instead of buying links how about you focus your time into writing more content. Here is a quick list of why content is king:

The more content you make the more pages you have on your site, that means more pages listed in google / yahoo and more opportunities to optimize for different keywords
The better your content the more likely people will link to your website, the more people who link to your website the better link popularity you get.
Visitors love content, period. If you have something good to read they will see more pages, more adverts and overall more sales
The more content pages you have the more search engines perceive you as an authority site. (Ill get onto this later, but that's a good think)
More bookmarkers

Yes people, content is king if you want search engine optimization success !

Use pingomatic

If you are unaware of pingomatic you are at a great loss compared to your blogging opponents. Pingomatic is a great service that pings your RSS feed to tons of sites which search engines readily monitor. On my new blogs I get spidered by yahoo 1 or 2 days after I ping and a few days later with google. It really is an invaluable service ! Remember if your using blogger, uncheck the "ping weblogs.com" box if you already ping them automatically.