SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Tips and Tools

During the initial stages of promoting a website to generate traffic, it is important to let people know that your site exists, and what it is about.  There are many ways which are both legal and ethical to promote a new site, including forums which allow users to post and review sites, submitting to directories (see below), creating and submitting sitemaps to popular search engines and much much more!

Once through the initial stages, a good way to increase and maintain a high ranking in search engines is to have a consistent amount of new and useful information being added to the site, which is not a duplicate of information already available on the internet.  This will give other webmasters and internet users a reason to create a link to your site from their own.

Many tools and resources are available to assist with website promotion and SEO, including keyword research tools which allow you to research popular keywords in search queries for popular search engines.  Detailed information about keyword popularity is made available by many search engines.  See (Keyword Research below).

Determining which keywords are most likely to get people to a site can help increase traffic by customising content on the site to ensure specific words are picked up by search engines as keywords.   Having a greater amount of useful text content on a page will result in a greater number of possible search queries which will return your site in the results.  Image Alt tags, and meta tags are also used by search engines to generate keywords for a page and site.

Forums can be a powerful tool, as many are highly ranked in search engines due to the many discussions which are and have taken place in the forum's threads.  Most forms allow you to create a signature, which can be appended to each post.  Signatures usually allow up to three links, which will start building up links to your site.

Many forums and sites also have an area where new websites can be posted for review and comments by other users.  This is very useful when starting a new site, as it is impossible to put yourself in the shoes of all possible users as a developer and as a consequence, will miss things that others may not.  Feedback is very important

The most valuable aspect of forums is the considerable amount of information available to be absorbed, as well as being able to ask and discuss questions and issues to help you learn, build reputation and backlinks.  A backlink in a signature from a forum thread which has relevance to your site should be much more effective than posting in forums which are irrelevant in order to boost the total number of backlinks.

Submitting your site or RSS feed to directories allows search engines to find links back to your site (backlinks) which increases your sites ranking in search results.  There are many discussions about the success of submitting to directories, as well as various techniques which should be utilised, and many which should be avoided.

Make sure you don't submit your site to the same server too frequently.  Once a day should be the most that you ping each server.  Your site will be removed and possibly banned from sites and directories if you have submitted your site more times than permitted in a short period of time.

Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) using the free WebmasterHub.net XML-RPC Bulk Ping blog / rss submitter.
Add your blogs / RSS feeds to your account dashboard and press Bulk Ping to bulk submit sites, blogs or rss feeds to over 50 popular sites and directories for free. Increase your site's search engine rankings and exposure to generate and boost traffic to your site.

A deep link is a link pointing to an internal page on your website from another site on the web. You will achieve a higher ranking in search engines when deep links to your site start to build up. A deep link from a relevant page on a highly ranked site to a page with relevant content on your site is ideal. Deep links also help search engines find your site, as they provide a different point of entrance.

Submitting sitemaps to search engines ensures that the search engine knows about all pages on the site.  Google's Webmaster Tools service allow webmasters to submit a sitemap (or RSS feed) containing links to all pages on a site, as well as showing how the site performs in search results and many other useful features.

Submitting a sitemap or RSS feed to a search engine can help ensure that the search engine knows about all pages on a site, but usually won't have any affect on the ranking of a site.  Building up backlinks and deep links (see above) to pages on your site will result in the pages being indexed by search engines, as well as an increase in the ranking for each page and the overall ranking and popularity of the website.

Increase your ranking on search engines using this Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tip for Blogger.com users. Add keyword and description metatags to post pages using the post labels.  See Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Blogger for details.

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