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How do I increase

traffic and get

good quality visitors

to my website?

Every second of every day millions of websites and web articles across the world are being constantly added to the world wide web and up-dated; thousands of new sites appear on the net and they're all vying to appear in prime position, mostly to sell their wares within the 'global village.' So how can you improve your chances of getting your website noticed by the right people looking for your product or service?

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Simply having a website is not sufficient to ensure people searching the internet will visit you. Without a tremendous amount of time and effort given to promoting your site (and optimising its content so search engines index it), only a small number of visitors will be aware of your online presence. No matter how great your web site design or functionality, it is a useless commodity if search engines have no idea it exists!

There are many guidelines to follow when building your website to stand any chance of it being found and associated with the right keywords and phrases. Once it is built you should submit your website to all the major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. After you submit your site, the search engine robots will visit it and 'crawl' through the content. If what they find reaches certain criteria - called algorithms - then pages from your site will be added to the search engine's index and your pages will appear in search engine results. These are called'organic' listings. However exactly what a search engine's exact algorithms are at any one time varies greatly.

You can also can buy advertising space to appear within the search engine results, these are called 'sponsored results'.

There is no guarantee of where your site will appear within a search results organic listings. If you're contacted by search engine optimisation (SEO) companies claiming to absolutely guarantee that they'll get your site to appear on the first page of Google's organic listings, then you should treat this with a certain degree of caution. If they do promise you this then make sure it is for the search terms that your customers would be most likely to use when trying to find the product or service you offer. Additionally make sure they are a reputable SEO company who do not use 'black hat' techniques to get your site at the top of listings, as anything underhand may eventually lead to your site been black listed and removed by the search engine!

Fortunately all is not lost though and there are 'honest and legal' ways to optimise a website to achieve higher ranking in search engines, thereby increasing the visibility of your website. Although there is no precise science, there are proven methods that a good search engine optimiser will employ that will ensure your web site gets noticed by the masses.

Here are a few basic rules to get started.

1. Content is King! The content within every page needs to be carefully written to incorporate a sufficient density of keywords that people may type into a search engine when looking for your products or services. If your main keyword is 'red widgets' then this should make up at least 4-6% of the words on your page.

2. Any meta titles or tags (the information code in the background of your website) should be 100% relevant to the content of the page. In other words whatever you specify in your meta tags should also appear somewhere within the visible text on the page.

3. Keywords should appear towards the top of the page and given more prominence, for example appearing in headings or in bold text. This makes it easier for search engine robots to recognise these words as having more importance than the rest of the content on your page.

4. The back end code of your website should be easy for robots to crawl, with no unfriendly code in there or items that could trap or trick spiders. Any black hat techniques used in the programming to fool a robot can lead to your site being penalised or at worst removed from the search engine's index altogether!

5. Build a good quality link profile. This is a very time consuming activity called 'link building' and it is a highly regarded method of attracting targeted visitors to your site. Having a decent number of links from other trusted websites is very important to search engines like Google, as they are a little like votes for your website. The better your inbound link profile, the higher your website is likely to rank on Google. However, you must exercise caution here and avoid falling into the trap of using link farms that generate thousands of low quality links to your site - ie from sites that have a very low ranking themselves or are totally unrelated to your industry. You need to ensure the quality of your link 'neighbourhood' remains high and this is best achieved by steadily building your links programme over time rather than employing mass automated methods.

Finally, you need to bear in mind that search engines want their users to receive quality results when they enter in a search term - if someone is searching for red widgets then that's exactly what the search results should give them. This ensures that surfers develop a loyalty to the search engine. So if your website is well designed with relevant and informative content, has clear keywords, is search engine robot friendly and has a good quality link profile, then it should perform very well.

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Allian graphics, web site design, SEO & property development marketing services.