SEO techniques to increase your website traffic
Everyone who tries to start a website gets the same problem : How to get traffic ?
There is many many paid ways to get traffic like using Google AdWords, referral programs like Affili.net, radio, television, newspapers, facebook ads and much much more. But you don't want to pay for every visitor you get on your website; you want people to find your site by the Google search engine (or Yahoo! and Altavista if you bother about the others). So, what to do ?
First, Google will find you site by itself some day, but you can help Google to find it by using the first technique.
1. Send Google a sitemap of all your pages on your website
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/AutresSites/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/NousContacterAccueil.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/CGU/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/FAQ.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Inscription.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
If your site is not 100% crawlable from the start page, Google (and all other search engines) will not be able to index all the pages on your site. In the same way, if you have dynamic pages, like single pages that accepts querystring parameters and display different content, you can add those complete URLs in your sitemap.
2. Use URL rewriting (relevant URLs)
The more relevant is your URL, the higher your rank will be on searches. Also, if you submit a sitemap (tip #1) with a lot of entries that all points to the same page with different querystring parameters, the search engines will not index all your pages and you will get warnings (on Google WebMaster Tools).
Check
my URL rewriting article to learn more about URL rewriting and how to include this functionnality in your existing website.
For the URL relevantness, if you have an URL like this one "http://www.onesite.com/article.aspx?id=25645151", you will easily be beatten by a URL like this one "http://www.shopcomputers.com/products/HDD/Western-Digital-HDD-WD3200-320GB-16MB-Cache.aspx" on the search results. If you think it does not really change anything because you think only the content of the page counts... your wrong. The URL is the most relevant part of the page. If the URL is long and explicit and have all the keywords you typed in the search engine query box, then the website will appear on the top results for sure.
3. Create links (linking sites)
If you want to be on the top search results, your website has to be linked by a lot of other websites. The more websites are linking to your website, the higher will be your PageRank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. In search results, your site will be shown before others that have lower PageRanks.
To get link you have several ways. You can...
a) Add you website URL to your signatures so when you write on forums or blogs, you website URL is put on the site everytime. This has not a real big impact because Google knows that it is not as relevent as a real link placed intentionnaly by the webamaster. But, it has an impact so do it.
b) Write an article about your website on Wikipedia (if it is big enough because Wikipedia will delete your article if your site is too small).
c) Submit your website to many internet directories. Those services are not really used by people to find websites... they used to be popular but now the reality has changed. Those services are mostly used to help you get links to your website.
d) Ask webmasters that have similar websites to add a reciprocal link (you add one, they add one).
e) Write articles of your website on your personal blog (if you have one)
f) Do social bookmarking. There are a lot of websites that offer you a simple and easy way to do social bookmarking for about 20$-50$. Every different services offer you to bookmark to about 100-300 social sites like Digg.it, Technocrati and kick.it. You can check
SocialMarking.com. I personnaly purchased SEO from them and I got my links.
g) Any other idea !? There are a lot of ways to get linking sites...
4. Don't write text on images
Write your text directly on your website pages. Text on images doesn't get indexed; plain text gets indexed so at least 99% of your text must be plain text. Your logo can be an image, but be sure that your brand name is written aa text on your pages too.
5. Stay tuned, check your current indexation level, and linking sites
When you work hard to index your website, and create link to increase your PageRank (AKA "PR") you might want to see if you techniques are working so the best way to check this is by adding the Webmaster tools to your Google account. Those tools gives you the chance to check directly on the Google's database the number of external links pointing to your site as well as every URL indexed by your sitemaps. Without using the Google Webmaster Tools you can check how many URLs of your site are being indexed. Just do a simple Google search like this : "site:www.iseduction.net". The "site:" prefix tells google to show results only for the specified website. You can also type a phrase to search in this site, but if you only type the URL, you will get every URL indexed for that website.
6. Add quality content in your website
If your website is community driven, the content is probably not a problem as the members continuously add stuff in it. But if your site is a dating site (for example, because I currently have 2 different dating sites,
www.iseduction.net and
www.quebecsexy.net), you have to add quality content in your pages around the user profiles. Have enough text with high density keywords to help the search engines really know what's in your site. The more content you have, the more the search engine will have something to index you with.
It looks easy but, if I take my personnal websites I own, only my blog has real quality et quantity stuff. My dating sites only have about 8-10 different pages. All other pages are in fact the same aspx page that displays members' profiles.
7. Optimize the title of your pages
Don't have the same boring title for every page you have on your site. You should have a different title for every page on your website. You can have a fixed part like your brand name followed by a dash and than a dynamic part. When you search with one or two different keywords, the webpages that has those keywords in the title will appear on top of the list. The page title is as important as the URL relevantness so don't neglate these parts. On search results, the keywords that are in the title of the pages appears in bold.
8. Optimize your META tags
Even if Google does not care about this, it should be a good idea to have good META tags on your HTML of every pages on your site. Old web page crawlers maybe still using the META technique to index your pages so, even if you don't really care about other search engines, it may be a good practice to do so. META tags must be placed in the <head> tag in your HTML pages and looks like this :
<head>
<meta name="description" content="your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization." />
<meta name="keywords" content="top 10 seo tips, what is seo, resources, seo software, seo ebook, search engine optimization" />
</head>
9. Use heading tags (H1, H2, H3)
This is important. If you all define you own classes and always use SPAN or DIV tags, the analyzer part of the crawler will have difficulty to know which part of the page is more important than which. Using header tags makes defining relevancy more easy because H1 is more important than H2, and H2 is more important than H3 and so on...
10. Assign ALT attributes to all you images
This will help indexing properly your images on your website. Images are not easy to index because there is not always a descriptive text near the image and that text is not always placed at the size position relative to the image. Using ALT tells exactly what the image is all about so it is very important for image indexing.
11. Include a robots.txt
This file needs to be placed at the root of your website. It contains information about what is allowed to be indexed and what is not allowed.
12. Validate the HTML and CSS code of your website
You can do this with the free tools provided by the W3C.
13. Add an analytics link in your pages
If you want to see if your SEO strategy works, you have to track any traffic change. The most powerful (and free) analytics tool is the Google Analytics.
14. Be patient, wait for results
The process of indexing a website is not really fast. The bigger your site is, the faster its new content gets indexed. By the time your site gets as big as CNN or Microsoft (if it happens one day) you can wait 1-5 weeks to see something on your Google Webmaster Tools.
Adding URL rewriting to my website; what do I need ?
First of all, if you're here you have a vague idea of what URL rewriting is and what it can add to your website.
The more relevant is your URL, the higher your rank will be on searches. If you submit a sitemap to Google with a lot of entries that all points to the same page with different querystring parameters, the search engine will not index all your pages and you will get warnings (on Google WebMaster Tools). So the best way is to always have unique URLs on your website, and if it's physically impossible, you can easily use URL rewriting.
Let me explain this with an example... if you have this url, http://www.yoursite.com/member.aspx?username=JohnSmith, you can rewrite it to be http://www.yoursite.com/members/JohnSmith. There is a lot of websites that uses URL rewriting. One of the most well-known is Wikipedia (here is an example of their URLs : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickOnce).
Even if your actual querystring parameters are not string values, you can use URL rewriting efficiently. Let's say you have the following URL : http://www.yoursite.com/catalog/products.aspx?productid=123456, you can rewrite it to http://www.yoursite.com/catalog/product123456.aspx.
Now, how to include this in my website ?
It's very easy to include URL rewriting in an existing website. Also, if you include URL rewriting, the old-fashioned way to access your pages will stay available, so you don't have to worry about adding URL rewriting on your production environment because you don't replace something, you add a functionnality.
URLRewriter is the most simple and powerful URL rewriting open source .Net component you can find on the web.
To configure it you simply have to add a custom section on your web.config file like this :
<rewrite url=?^(.*)/(\?.+)?$? to=?$1/default.aspx$2?? />
For example, if we write the XML .config tag for the first URL (JohnSmith) it would be :
<rewrite url=?^(.*)/members/(.+)$? to=?$1/member.aspx?username=$2? />
And for the second URL :
<rewrite url=?^(.*)/catalog/product(.+).aspx? to=?S1/catalog/products.aspx?productid=$2? />
What URL rewriting does is to take the URL in the "url" property of the "rewrite" config element and rewrite it to the format of the "to" property so that the real request you get is a request to you product.aspx page with the productid querystring parameter that you can retreive easily.