When it comes to doing business online, you will soon discover that it's all about the traffic. Traffic, or the number of internet users you'd be able to generate for your website, is and will always be the lifeblood of any online venture. After all, what good is a website when there's no one there to see its pages? How successful will your digital products be if no one would be able to know about them? Who will avail of your services when no one will get exposed to their existence?
Contrary to what many people believe, generating traffic for your website does not start once you pages are published and have gone live. Traffic generation strategies start at the very moment you are conceptualizing an idea for the website itself.
This is what on page search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. It is concerned with techniques that you could implement on your web pages themselves to ensure a good volume of traffic for your website. 80% of your traffic would come from the many search engines in the World Wide Web. If each and every web page you have is optimized for these search engines, then your website would be in a good position to have a high rank for the results of every relevant query.
- Keyword selection. Choosing the right keywords is essential for the success of your website. Keywords are the popular search terms that people use to gather information from the search engines. If your web pages are populated by the right density of the correct keywords, then you'll have better chances of winning the attention of the search engine spiders. To determine the appropriate keywords for the subject that your website will be servicing, use the free tools that can be found at http://www.nichebot.com .
- Keyword placement in content. Content is the king of the internet. But even royalty needs support. Populate your content with the proper amount of keywords. A density level of at least 2% should be sought. This means that the right keywords should be mentioned at least twice for every 100 words of text.
- META tags. META tags are HTML codes that do not have a bearing on the physical appearance of your web pages, but they do inform the search engine spiders that such web pages are appropriate for a particular query. Always include the following META tags on the top portion of your source code. You could copy-paste them from the list below, but do change the indicated fields. Also, make sure that you include your keywords as much as you could on your META tags.
- ALT tags. ALT tags refer to the text that would appear every time the mouse cursor would pass through an image. Your ALT tags should include your keywords.
- Page titles. Page titles are the captions that appear at the very top of your web page. Make sure that each web page in your website would have a different title that will include the appropriate keywords.
- Focus. Remember, search engines will crawl through your website per page. Each page is a different project altogether. Focus is the key. Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase. If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made. Also, it would greatly help if you would name the page file in a manner that would include the keyword or key phrase it is focused on. For example, http://www.thisisyourwebsite.com/thisisyourkeyword.html is a good page filename that would help boost your SEO efforts.
These are fairly basic guidelines, and for most people they will be 'common sense'. The savvy web marketers will take it even though, and there's a few of these advanced techniques that are particularly useful for photographers.
- Subjects As Keywords. Don't focus too much on photography, photos or images in your keywords ... they will happen automatically. You'll do much better if you focus on your subjects. After all, your subjects are what your visitors will be searching for.
- Descriptive Titles and Captions. Don't get too arty or abstract in your page titles or photo captions. That text is what the search engines will use to evaluate the content on your pages, so ALWAYS use keywords there in readable descriptive phrases. If you use irrelevant text, the people who might have wanted to buy your work, won't even know you exist.
- Concentrated Content. OK, this is Focus revisited ... as a photography website your written content is limited, so you need to make what sure the written content you do have is always work hard with you not against you. So don't mix your photos up, group similar subject matter on the same page, but do mix your captions up. Make sure all the images on a given page have different caption info!
( This has to do with the duplicate content issue, which is a whole other article, so for now just trust me ... mix up your captions! ) - Structure Your Content. Search engines are looking for websites & content that is good for people, so make sure your website and content is structured in a user-friendly, logical hierarchy. Then as you do any website promotion and back linking work, you should focus the bulk of your attention towards the top of your structure as shown ...