I got a call from a dear friend with a website the other day, her web designer had created her site on one of those generic create-a-site online software and hosting places (which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent). Now this site building software does not allow you to enter your own keywords or metatags, so what can she do to enhance SEO and Traffic? Everyone knows we need food in the form of keywords and metatags for the search engine spiders to feed on.

As we all should know our websites usually need to have our well researched and constantly updates keywords entered in the appropriate places and those keywords also need to be turned metatag descriptions for our site and our contnet pages and this needs to be done in a way that is like porridge – just right. When done well our keywords and metatags encourage and make it easy for the search engine spiders to find, catalogue and crawl our site – thus improving our ranking, searchability and traffic.

So what do we do if we have a generic site building software that claims to add the appropriate keywords and metatags for us? Well, some of us will be very happy we don’t have to go to all that trouble , and some of us will be worried that this just isn’t going to be good enough.

The lady in question was in the last group, she was very worried about it and like most of us cannot afford to have her site all redone on other software, at least not right now. She arranged to spend a couple of hours with me on Skype to sort out her options and this is what I advised her to do:

1. Create high ranking links to the site: Did you know that Google and many other search engines now count incoming links at least, if not more highly than keywords and metatags. The strategy behind this is that if you have high ranking links coming in to your site (one way) and some going out (reciprocal) that each of those is agreeing that your site is about what you say it is. A kind of verification, if you will that your site is kocher, almost like a recommendation, and the higher ranked the site the more impressed the search engines are.In this case web directories are your answer,  the more highly ranked the better. Of course the easiest way to tell if they’re highly ranked is to choose the ones that are on the first page and at the top. What is really great is that as you are filling out the submission forms for these directories they ask for a site description (metatag) and your tags or keywords thus fulfilling your need to have keywords and metatags that are searchable by the search engines. General directories are great and the first one to go for is DMOZ.com which is a human edited directory with perhaps the highest Google ranking of all. When you have submitted your site to the general directores, the next ones to go for are those in your niche again looking for the highest ranking ones.

2. Claim your site/s and blog/s: Did you know in many cases your sites and blogs have already been noted by some sites and are just waiting to be claimed by you? Any blog whether it is a stand alone blog or one attached to a site, is ready to be claimed at Technorati (and other blogging directories) so go straight there and create an account and claim your blog, this counts as a very high ranked recommendation. If and when your blog is over 6 months old submit it to Best of  The Web Blog Directory but remember it must be at least 6 months old. Now go to Alexa and claim your site, add information, keywords and tags etc..

3. Use social media to drive traffic and add incoming links to your site: via community sites like Facebook and Twitter, creating articles and pages on sites like eZine, Squidoo and HubPages with links to both your site and your blog, and internal pages on your site as deep links are needed for your site to be taken seriously. If you haven’t already get an account on all of these sites and learn to use them, add in some videos coming in from your YouTube account, and an online image album to your site with all the images tagged with your keywords and site url with Flckr and next thing you know your site will be high in the rankings and traffic will be increasing on a daily basis.

My motto in life is, “there is always another way”, and in my experience there always is. Use these tactics to improve SEO on any site, please don’t rely on just your keywords and metatags even if you have a site that allows you to add your own. This information is vital and in some cases even more important than getting your keywords and metatags exactly right!

Have fun!

© 2009, AnnieInfinite. All rights reserved.

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Technorati, Web crawler, Web search engine, Website

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