Getting the most traffic to your website is the goal of all companies doing business online. There are many different ways to drive traffic to your website, but possibly still the best and most exciting is via the organic, or natural search results. SEO or Search Engine Optimization has been around for years, and as Google, Yahoo, and MSN have evolved so has website optimization. However, good search engine strategy hasn’t really charged too much over the years. Everything relating to getting more organic traffic is pretty darn intuitive and by using certain principles relating to content production you can acheive higher rankings and more organic traffic. Of course, make sure all your meta-tags are well done and thorough on all pages of your site. Make sure “alt text” for images is present as well. When the search engines “index” your site they are reading ALL the content in the code of your page, so take advantage of that when possible. Also, linking to the main areas of your site from your homepage is a good idea. Any pages linked from your homepage will likely rank higher than the pages deeper linked in your site. So make sure you are linking to your main areas i.e. top level categories, geo-targeted pages, important sales info…from your homepage. Inbound linking is also important and having a good inbound linking strategy in place is vital. There are many responsible, natural and free ways to increase your inbound links and this should be a constant strategy on a weekly basis. Sounds like a lot to do? You could probably staff 3 full-time people to manage good, constant SEO for your site minimum! We can go into that at a latter date…anyways, here are three main principles you should adhere to in your business philosophy regarding SEO and your website:

- Quality of Content – Making sure your site content is written as well as it can be. This can be a relative thing, but making sure each page has well-written content is always recommended.
- Frequency of Content – You should update your site with new pages of content on a daily basis. The search engines love it when you work on your site a lot, so I usually recommend adding 5-10 pages, posts or articles a day to your site. Posting multiple times a day gets the search engines, especially Google, sending their spiders back to your site to check for new content hundreds of times a day.
- Length of Post/Article – I do feel that the length of your articles/posts/reviews is extremely important so you can garner more search results per page of your site. Why not capitalize on pages that rank really well by adding more content to those pages. Always make sure to keep your content well-placed on the page, as to not distract from the ultimate goal of converting that visitors into a buyer. Several Calls-to-Actions should always be present on all of your sites pages, if these pages are intended to bring in more sales or leads. Using banner and text link placements are key on these pages. I also recommend newsletter sign-up boxes on all your site’s inner pages and other functions to get people interacting with your site like forward-to-a-friend.

This isn’t everything you need to know regarding having a growing, productive, well-ranking SEO presence, but its a nice start. I have to come to believe that the quality of your on-site content is the single most important factor in getting your site ranked higher and more pages ranking. Also, frequency of posting new content to your site is huge to pumping out new pages of content that can bring you more search traffic. Length of post is also huge because I have sites where an obscure phrase buried on the page pulls a #1 ranking and brings in a new visitor. Whether you have a new site or an old site, you can work aggressively to improve your search rankings. There is no reason at all you shouldn’t be driving thousands of visitors to your site through organic search on a daily basis. Let us know if we can help you get better rankings and more search traffic.

Just got this nice little email from Yahoo. They are going to be giving a web conference on holiday PPC strategies. Should be pretty good. Check out the info they emailed me:

Please join us on October 28, 2008 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time, as we present Yahoo!’s 2008 Holiday Consumer Overview and Search Best Practices Web Conference. The free webinar will cover the following topics:

Space is limited, so sign up today!

https://www.meeting.corp.yahoo.com/system/content/folder/listing?date=2008-10-18T18%3A02%3A15.887%2B00%3A00&sco-id=2340477&set-lang=en

Google is coming out with their own internet browser called Chrome. I’m sure it will be cool and have a lot of features. It will be open-source so developers can new applications for it and it can be customized to the users liking. This is just another way for Google to get their advertisers ads more run, but it’s good anytime Google can expand their syndication.

Technorati Tags: matt cutts,seo tips,seo tools,what is seo,seo for beginners

Most of us know who Matt Cutts is, but for those who still don’t know he is currently working for Google and has been their “spokes person” for years. Matt Cutts has discussed some of his SEO tips, but people were looking for advanced SEO tactics. Unfortunately, he discussed those SEO tips, which are worthwhile primarily for beginners. But all people doing website optimization should adhere to these principles. I have added some commentary on these principles.

So, If you’re a beginner or just have started to put your foot inside SEO arena, then the following tips may really help you:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page. If you want to be found for your top keyword, make sure that term is on the page you want to get ranked. The term should be at the top as well as peppered throughout your copy. But only within the normal flow for the content. Don’t over-do your main keywords. Keyword density is a thing of the past. Make sure to build out a multi-page site with all pages containing unique content, there is nothing worth that duplicate content!
2. Fill in your meta-tags The two most important tags are Title and Description b/c that’s what is displayed in the search results. However the keyword tag is also important but keep it to like 5 or 6 terms.
3. Get other sites to “link” back to you. This is one of the most important of the 100s of factors Google considers when ranking sites. However, I don’t recommended too many reciprocal links. Post on relevant blogs and forums that are “do follow” are a great way to gain lots of free inbound links.
4. Create a blog and post often. This can help you get links.
5. Register for free tools. Cutts recommends using the tools at google.com/webmaster, as well as creating a text-based sitemap www.xml-sitemaps.com, and adding your business to Google’s Local Business center (google.com/local/add).

The above tips would definitely help the newbies but in our opinion, not very much useful for advanced SEOers. Basic SEO principles have not changed much in years. If you do the rigth things with your sites you will be search engine friendly and gain higher rankings. Feel free to comment about Matt Cutts’s SEO Tips and we would also like to hear your personal SEO tips if you would like to share with us here.

Pronounced “cool”, the Cuil.com search engine was developed by Google engineers that left Google in 2006. It boasts 3x the indexed pages at 120 billion. However the site wasn’t resolving for me, so the first thing they should do is get some more servers to handle the traffic! Check it out here: www.cuil.com.