Put Your Site On Steroids

About a year ago I relaunched my freelance writing career. I needed a place where people could see my work and credential and I needed people to be able to find me quickly. That meant a website and lots of promotion, but I didn't have any money. Here are the steps I took to get myself a search engine ranking and build my site traffic to 1,000 unique visitors a month in less than a year. This is all about how I used search engine optimisation to put my site on steroids.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of making it easy for search engines to find and index web pages. The easier it is for search engines to find your pages, the more likely it is that someone will come to your website and offer you work or buy a product you've offered for sale. SEO increases traffic to a website or blog and makes it more likely that someone will click on ads and boost the site owner's Adsense earnings.

How do I optimize my website?

If you're launching a site from scratch, you start with keyword research. If you're updating an old site, start with keyword research. If you want to bring traffic to your blog (and can write about anything), start with ... (you get the idea). Think about what keywords best describe your website, business or blog and what similar keywords people are searching for. There are a few free tools that will help if you're on a tight budget. They are:

• Overture
• WordTracker and Overture compared

• Google Adwords Tool

These tools are simple to use. You type the keywords you want into the form, enter and you get back a list of related keywords or the number of times those keywords have been searched in the past month. Once you've identified the keywords that are best for you, you need to put them into your page content.

What are the most important metatags?

The main ones are:

<title> This comes up at the top of the browser and is the first line of an entry on a Google search. This should be short, or the most important aspects should be at the start.

<description> This comes up as the second part of a Google, Yahoo or MSN listing. The description should be relevant to the site content.

<keywords>. Use a few, relevant keywords, rather than cramming in as many as you can type. Search engines usually downgrade you if they think your keywords are not relevant. When I researched my own site, I found that people searching for freelance writers also search for 'write articles'; those searching for ghostwriters also searched for 'write your life story', so I've included those in my metatags.

Tip: One of the ways you can make search engines take more notice of these keywords is by using emphasis. Heading tags (h1, h2, h3), strong or <b> (to make text bold) and em for italics highlight the parts of the page you think are worth paying attention to and Google, Yahoo and MSN will take notice of them too.

Search engines like pages with lots of links. Inbound links are best (those are links from other sites to your page) - and will improve your PageRank quickly, but cross-linking of pages within your site is also good. Cross-linking shows that different pages of your website are relevant to each other - and relevance is a big factor in improving PageRank. If you know what you want to do with your site, this will be an easy step to take.

If you have a big site, this can take a while, but luckily there are lots of free tools that will do it for you.

Freefind provides a sitemap and free (ad-sponsored) search box for your site. Freefind will create a sitemap page, which you can customise to suit your web template. Freefind will also search your site at specified intervals and update the sitemap.

You can also create a special Google Sitemap (here's why) and upload it to your server. Two free online services are:

• Sitemapspal
• Online Sitemap Creator

You can also download Google's own Sitemap Generator.

How else can search engines find my site?

Some search engines look for a special file called a <b>robots.txt </b>file. This stays on your server and tells it which search engines can search your site and which can't. The reason to have one is so that you can block any search engine bots that bring spam in their wake. (This is only a basic level of protection, which relies on spam bots respecting the boundaries you have set.) However, you can also specify which folders search engines are allowed to spider&nbsp; just in case you're storing anything confidential on your server.

You can create a robots.txt file then upload it to your server. It also provides an example of a robots.txt file.

While you're waiting for the big three to find your site, have a look at some of the smaller search engines.

Google, Yahoo and MSN also crawl other search engines, so submitting to some of the lesser known ones (which are likely to list you faster) will help to get you on their list. A resource I found really useful was WebCEO, free software that automates website management and tracking. It includes keyword and page optimisation tools and a very good submission tool.

You can also submit your website to relevant directories, and I know of another free resource that will help you to do it. The SEO friendly directory list catalogues directories by interest and country and includes PageRank information for each directory listed. That means you can decide which directories are worth bothering with.

Resubmit your site every six months to keep the listing fresh and practice deep submission - submitting links to individual pages that you think are important.

Tip: Set up a disposable email address just for site submission, because you will get a LOT of email. You'll also find that you've been subscribed to lots of site promotion newsletters, most of which are a waste of time.

Join a few forums that are relevant to your area and post regularly. Most forums allow you to customise your signature so that every comment you make has a link back to your site or blog. These posts are also indexed by search engines.

Get a blog. The advantage of blogging is that that you can write more or less what you like and there's nothing to stop you from putting in affiliate links. This is perhaps the quickest way to get your content found as, for the time being at least, Google, Yahoo and MSN can't get enough of blogs and bloggers.

Use tagging. Make use of tagging. Posts or sites that are tagged by Technorati and del.icio.us (a social bookmarking service) are picked up very quickly by search engines.

Add an RSS (really simple syndication) feed for site updates and news (or include updates in your blog, which is likely to have its own RSS feed). Use the pinging service to alert people that your content has changed.

Put Your Site On Steroids- My Squidoo lens on the same theme