Web Designers Portal

As we all know making a website does not guarantee instant traffic and success.
There are many methods to marketing a website tin order to acquire traffic.

One must think how does a user find my website?
Here are some following ways:

• - Word of Mouth
• - Repeat Visitors
• - Advertisements
• - Search Engines
• - Referral Links
• - etc

One major source of traffic for websites happen to be Search Engines; this may not apply to all websites but for most it is very common. That's why many webmasters focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) when carrying out a marketing plan for their website. With SEO webmasters hope to improve traffic from search engines by earning a high ranking and targeting specific keywords. In order to achieve such results a website must be search engine friendly and meet other criteria, where SEO then comes into play.

Here is a list of some basic SEO pointers and guidelines:

• Make sure your title tag has some descriptive keywords but don't overload it
• Make sure to use key words through out your body content especially within header tags, bold tags, strong tags
• Create unique content
• Use descriptive alt tags for images
• Use descriptive title tags for links
• Submit to Quality Trusted Search Engines yourself
• Submit to dmoz.org, many search engine index it's directory
• Create a sitemap of your site to submit to search engines
• Use meta tags (avoid keyword stuffing)
• Link Building: Get other sites to link to your site
• Create a robots.txt file

here are some references:

Google-Friendly Practices:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/b...c.py?topic=8522
Yahoo Content Quality Guidelines:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/ba../basics18.html
Website SEO score tool:
http://www.websitegrader.com/


Those where just a few basic pointers that cover the basic aspects of SEO and if followed can definitely help attain a search engine friendly website. There are also practices to avoid when trying to optimize your site. Some of these practices may be known as unfair or black-hat technique.

For example:

• Hidden text
• Doorway Pages
• Unwarranted Redirecting
• Non-relevant link exchanges
• Key word spamming

These methods are basically sneaky workarounds to try and get a high ranking fast.
Using these methods on your pages will negatively affect your site’s ranking.
Avoid these methods, I will eventually go into more depth about the practices to avoid.

Remember be patient and do not over obsess with search engine rankings.
Reminds me of a quote: “He that can have Patience, can have what he will” - Benjamin Franklin

Good luck and happy Search Engine Optimizing!