Search Engine Optimization Company

Do you know what traffic worthy website is? We are talking about SEO here, so building traffic worthy website is one thing that most people overlook. People mostly focus on SEO aspects, but they forget the most important thing, the quality of their website.

If you aim to rank high on some terms you might accomplish that with good SEO, but you will eventually lose to the competition if you do not have the quality content on your website. Number one ranking in search engines will be meaningless if the competitor’s website offers more than yours. Therefore, let’s focus on building traffic worthy website.

The goals of any search engine when compiling ranks are usability of a website, functionality and quality of information provided on that website. You have to understand that getting a high rank is one thing, but keeping that rank over a longer period of time is something completely different. By giving the search engines what they need from the start, you can achieve that goal.

Usability of a website

Usability of a website is defined by ease of use when looking at the design, functionality, navigation and architecture of your website. Here are a few things you need to concentrate on to make a website with high usability:

Design

The website’s design, its graphic elements and layout have the biggest influences on its overall usability. The biggest mistake people make when designing a site is making it look flashy. While the site may look grand on the first look the usability may be compromised. Visibility and contrast are the two very important factors, since they decide how easily a visitor can interact and view text and content on the website. To make your website even more usable you need to separate every unique section like advertising, menu, navigation, search bars and content.

Navigation

Well constructed navigation that can easily connect to the deepest pages on your website is crucial. Navigation is one of the basic and primary functions on a website. Well constructed navigation with highlighted keywords that show what a visitor will see on the next page is a must for a quality website.

Information Architecture

Well composed hierarchy of a website will greatly enhance its usability. By providing topics and categories you will help the visitors find what they are looking for on your website much easier. People want to find what they are looking for easily, so a bad architecture can cost you visitors.

Functionality

You need to make sure that everything on your website functions properly and with no errors. Your tools, scripts and images need to be viewed correctly no matter what browser the visitor uses. Many people still use Internet Explorer 6, so if you make a website to function only for Mozilla you will lose quite a number of visitors.

Content

The website’s content is very important, not only for quality but also for usability, and people tend to overlook it. You need to make the headlines descriptive as possible, also the accuracy of the information provided and quality of the content will greatly enhance the usability and will help you get more links.

Usability of a website is the key to making your website worth traffic. High usability will ensure more links, and your visitors will be satisfied, which means higher conversion rates. You don’t want to put your visitors in a position when they have to think what they need to do on your website.

One of the things you need to keep an eye on is the overall appearance of your website. Yes, you need to make it easy for surfing, but a low budget look may hurt the image of your website. Therefore, hiring a professional designer is always the best option. In most cases people judge your website in the first 10 seconds, and we all know how much a first impression is worth. Your site needs to have a professional look and you can get that by focusing on:

• Defined navigation
• Elegant color scheme
• Attractive lines and shading
• High quality photos
• Design that creates intuitive flow of information

Design of your website doesn’t directly influence the ranking in the search engines, however it can do a lot for your website. A professional design can bring you more links, it can keep visitors coming over and over again, it also builds trust and of course usability. All in all, a professional design will affect your rankings as well.

The last but the most important part is the content itself. Your website will never be ranked high, no matter how good the design, links or other aspects of SEO are, unless you have high quality content since the authority search engines will always reserve the high ranks for websites that offer quality content with relevancy. Until you have that sorted don’t even try to work on other aspects of optimization.

If you wish to build traffic worthy website, attract more visitors and keep them you need to cover all the aspects of website optimization.

There are two sides of SEO, the first part is website optimization the second part is website promotion. Once you get your website up and running and you optimize your pages you need to start promoting it. Just building links won’t help you achieve a thing, since search engines can recognize a link spam. You need to do a natural (organic) link building if you want to achieve success.

Building organic links means writing articles, maintaining blogs and making press releases. That will help you rank higher, but that is not the only goal here. Visits you get from a search engine are less than 50% of traffic, so that means that other 50% or more comes from those links. By following one or several link building methods, you will be building your audience as well.

Community Building

Community building is the first phase in growing your websites popularity. You need to create a user base that will overtime become a solid community. This is not an easy task at all, however if you can do it, you will always have returning users. You can achieve this by building a forum or blog or any other multi user interface. That is a hard task but the benefits are great.

Press Release

Press releases are a great way to obtain links. Press releases for your website and its activity need to have catchy titles that describe the release itself. Good structure of a press release is necessary. There are even SEO websites that focus on optimizing press releases. Make sure to check them out.

Link Building

The best way to build your links if you are starting out in an already established niche is by monitoring and analyzing the links of your competitors. You don’t need to do your research when somebody else has already done it for you. There are several ways to inspect backlinks of a competitor’s website.

The easiest way of doing this is by using some of the applications and programs the SEO specialists have developed. Of course, don’t just submit to any website offering links, you are aiming for organic traffic after all.

Building Reputation

Building reputation and at the same time popularity is the most important part of owning a website. It does take a lot of time, but in the end it is worth the effort. Your income will depend mostly on your reputation and popularity. The best place to start is by building a unique personality of your website. Every niche is explored and used, so the only way you are going to separate yourself from the competition is by creating something different when it comes to your site, by giving it personality.

Letting the people know more about your website and gaining popularity, and at the same time developing personality, requires a lot of personal effort. This means that you are need to use forums, blogs, chat rooms and other social media websites in order to inform people about your website.

Always use the same picture, same avatar, and same signature for all of those. Be honest with the people and give honest and useful advices. Interaction with people is crucial in the beginning. This is the best way of gaining organic traffic.

Targeted Keywords

The last part about gaining popularity is getting your name out in every way possible. We already covered all the basics, but now we are returning to the roots of SEO, keyword targeting. It is difficult to find a short term or short keyword phrase that has low competition. For those kinds of words you will have hard time ranking in the search engines first 20. So, what can you do?

You need to target long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are easier to rank for, competition is smaller and they tend to bring more organic traffic. A person that knows what he wants will type in a long tail keyword, and that person is more likely to make a purchase or convert. Another great aspect of long tail keywords is that you get to establish yourself as an expert in a sub niche.

Every niche is covered, but every niche has sub niches. Therefore, if you tap your website into one of those sub niches you may build up popularity and authority. That is what search engines like and they will give you a high ranking. That is also what people like. If they see you as an expert in a certain field or niche they are more likely to visit your website and revisit it later.

In the end, gaining popularity for your website and keeping it is an ongoing process like most parts of SEO. Building a website and maintaining it over a few years is a lot of work, but if done properly it can be very profitable. You need to remember, if you want your website to be around in a few years, you have to work on its content, authority, personality and eventually popularity.

Stay focused on the most important aspects of website optimization and you will be on a good path to make your website popular.

Maybe the best way to understand SEO and to start optimizing your website properly is to get a good understanding of how search engines operate. By now you certainly know what SEO is and how it may help your website attract more traffic. To expand that knowledge even further you will need to know the way search engines index and rank your pages.

There is a very short list of actions that search engines do in order to index a website:

Crawling

Crawling the web is the first thing search engines do. They have automated spiders that use hyperlink structure to crawl the web, pages and documents the WWW (World Wide Web) consist of.

Indexing

The second step is indexing. Once a page has been “crawled” the content of the page can be indexed. That means that the content will be stored in a giant database. This may sound easy but it is not. When you type in a specific search in a search engine you get the results in a fraction of a second, so that means that the database is highly managed.

Processing the queries

This is where the third part comes in – the queries procession. When you request information using a search engine, the engine looks up and retrieves all related data to your search. Therefore, if you typed “website optimization” into the search engine it will give you all the results matching those words. It will give you a broad result however, because it will match all of those words separately. If you were to run a search on “search engine process”, with quotes, you would find more relative results as the engine will display the results only for the matching keyword.

Ranking

Ranking is the last step and an actual result of this whole process. After the engine has found your match it will run an algorithm that will determine the ranking of your search results. The engine does that in order to give you the most relevant results for your search, so that means the first result is more likely to be relevant than the 23rd.

Closer Look at Search Engines

There are of course other aspects that go deeper into the world of search engines. You need to follow that trail in order to get the insight into the work of search engines. There are two things that a search engine counts in order to rank a page when you make a search. Those are relevance and popularity.

Relevance is actually counting. That is what it comes down to. When you run a search, the engine will go through the document and inspect it for the matching keywords. The more keywords appear on a page the more relevant the engine will find the page to be. There are other aspects to it as well, so simple keywords stuffing will not do the trick, and in fact it may turn to be lethal for your website.

Popularity is measured by citation of a document retrieved that matched the search you made. Search engines calculate the popularity by cross-referencing the content with other sites and pages pointing to it. What it comes down to is that search engines look if the search performed matches some important parts of the document, heading, titles and the body. They also perform a link analysis to see who is linking to the site and what do they say about the site, and more importantly, are they trustworthy.

This means that search engines operate on a totally different level than they did before, taking much more thing into consideration in order to figure out the relevance and popularity. The two important things search engines look is quantity and quality of links, the second one being more important. If there are thousands of links pointing to your website in the eyes of the search engines your site is popular. However, if you add trustworthy sites that link to yours, you will gain higher ranking from one such link than from hundreds of others.

Page rank

A high page rank means that the site is considered trustworthy by search engines. As mentioned before, one link from a highly ranked site can be worth thousand links from other low ranked sites. The important thing is that the page rank can be passed on.

Page ranking isn’t everything for a search engine however, since there are low ranked pages that are highly ranked in search engines’ queries. What this means is that the search engines rely on many other aspects and they are becoming even cleverer every day. The best example of this is the smart algorithm for the search engines that picks up synonyms and homonyms of a word. If you type something like “paper figures”, the search engine may give you results for origami, which is probably what you were looking for. Search engines are using their smart programs to identify synonyms for the content of the page you are searching for. That means that even though a webpage didn’t try to rank for those keywords, search engine’s algorithm will collect the data and translate it.

Search engines are evolving and algorithms are changing. No matter what kind of research you do, you will have to keep up with the ever-changing search engines’ operations in order to follow the latest trends and use them to your advantage.

Learning more about how the search engines operate is of the essence when it comes to search engine optimization process.