Web Design/SEO: Getting Traffic and Backward Links
Hopefully you have read my first article on the first steps, as without a cleanly well written site you could find yourself struggling to get results from search engines.
Now you have your site up and running, you have chosen your keywords and you want to start seeing results, my first suggestion so you can monitor your results is to sign up to Google analytics, also use Google’s webmaster tools, you will need to create an xml sitemap. This way you can see how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and with webmaster tools you can also see which keywords are doing well. Using this information you will know which key phrases will need extra work.
OK, so now you can monitor your results, I will now say to sign up to yahoo answers, create a profile, have a link to your site then start looking for questions in your expertise, answer the questions clearly trying to be as helpful as you can. You will find that some people will start to recognize you as very helpful, also, if you answer enough questions (get 250 points) then each link you add in your answer will become active, allowing you to have backward links to your site, try to answer some questions without a link back, don’t abuse the links, try to make it link to a relevant part of your site if it will help the person asking the question. Keeping your answers well written will help towards getting your answer voted as the best answer, once this has happened, your answer will be the only one visible initially. YouTube is also a good way, if you can have any video clips of your products, or a service you have provided, create a YouTube account, post this on YouTube, write some comments and have a link back to your site.
Now I would say open a blog, I use eblogger, use this to brag about work you have done, chat about things work related, post images add your YouTube clips, occasionally have a link back to your site or a relevant page in your site, don’t forget to try to mention your key phrases in your text (again, DON’T SPAM). Next, create some articles, write articles on what you know, try to offer advice, be as informative as you can, for example, I build websites so I’m providing information on web design and how to make the most of your website. I use ezine to upload my articles.
If you sell products, get a Google merchant account, this will allow you to integrate your products with Google products, Google also provide charts on how many times each product has been seen and how many clicks, great way to increase some sales and view how well each product is doing. Also if you are selling products, try to add Facebook “like” buttons on each product, as each time someone “likes” your product, the product with a link will show on the Facebook uses profile, again, another backward link.
I would also strongly suggest you sign up to twitter and create a Facebook page, not only can you add backward links here, these are great ways to build up a fan base, allow people to follow you in what ever way they prefer, that way each time you write an article, add a new pages to your site, offer a new service or even have some new information you would like to share, post a message on your social networking sites, your followers and fans will then see the update, if they “like” your message, this will then get posted on there wall for their friends to see too. Add a link from your social networking sites to your website, search engines like to see this too so will also help your search engine optimization.
Lastly, keep your site updated, add new pages, information, update your content, monitor your keywords as mentioned above using webmaster tools then make the required adjustments to your content to help improve some keywords, each time you do so, resubmit your sitemap with Google webmaster tools. Search engines like to see an active site, and will crawl your site more often and also give you some points over sites that have been the same for weeks.
All these points above will help you do well on search engines, some keywords will probably not need that much work, it all depends on what key phrases you want to use, the more specific the easier it will be, but the less it will be searched, researching your keywords is very important to help you know which to use.
try to have a daily pattern, i.e. update website, answer a question, post a clip on YouTube, do some blogging, write an article, try not to spend too much time each day, the amount of time depends on your keywords and the competition that is out there, if you just spend any time you can without it affecting your work load, you can at least monitor how well it is going after a couple of months then you should be able to work out how much time each day you would need to spend to start seeing page one results.
Ok, I hope you found this helpful, let me know if you have any questions and I wish you all the best with your website. More articles to follow shortly.