Lesson 4: Becoming An SEO Traffic Magnet

Regardless of how absolutely fantastic your site is when you finish creating it, it’s not going to make you any money whatsoever without some targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is the kind of visitors who WANT to be there – they are online searching for information in a specific niche – and you want it to be the site you created instead of one your competitor made.

Random traffic is different; these visitors don’t usually have an interest in the specific niche like those who are searching for your niche on purpose. The targeted visitor is the one you want what's on your site, so you have to devise ways to make that happen. That’s where the keyword research you did comes into the fore, along with some other key elements we’ll cover in this lesson.

There are typically two tactics to drive traffic to your site: on-page and off-page. And since this course is about the building blocks of a content site, I am only covering the on-page tactics today.

On-Page Search Engine Friendliness

You definitely do want to optimize your website for the search engines so they will happily pick you up and continue to send their bots (bots are used in web spidering [searching a site’s content], where an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human) out to revisit your site on a regular basis, as well.

Title Tags: These are what you see across the very top edge of your browser window when you visit a website. You would be surprised how many people fail to utilize this important SEO component... yet it’s actually the highest weighted on-page optimization you can do. Use your main keyword(s) in it, keep it as short as possible, and never make it ‘spammy’.

I’m sure you’ve seen the pages that people don’t optimize, like every page has the same name or something like “Page 1” “Page 2” etc. These are obviously NOT good title tags; the title should actually be different for each page, properly reflecting the keyword or key phrase that best describes that particular page.

Meta Tags: That’s why it’s important to include what’s called “meta-tags” in your website’s HTML code. These tags go before the ending tag in your source code. There are many meta tags you can use but these two are the most vital to do properly.

• The Meta Description Tag: The first is a meta description tag, which usually include a sentence that describes your site’s purpose, using your main keywords and key phrases that people might use to find your site, and other valuable information for the search engine bots to find and index. Some engines ignore meta-tags, but I always include them just in case. It doesn’t take that long to create them.
• The Meta Keywords Tag: The second (and probably most important) is your meta keywords tag, and it needs to ONLY include actual keywords found on your web page. When people add non-related keywords or keywords or phrases that are not even on their page, it’s called ‘keyword stuffing’, which is NOT looked upon kindly by the search engines.

H1 and H2 tags: These are pretty important to the search engines as well... even if you don’t keep the H1 at the size your HTML editor makes them (which is usually pretty BIG). You can set the font sizes for your pages very easily using CSS style sheets or CSS commands in your header area.

It’s also very helpful to be sure you use your main site keyword in the text you include within the parameters of these important tags (H1 is usually the main page’s headline) and in the sub headline (H2 is usually the size chosen for the sub headline text located directly below the headline text).

Just make sure that what you are stating in your page headline and sub headline makes good sense, in context with the use of the keywords. Your page will jump miles ahead in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) versus the ones that don’t take the time to do these simple SEO steps.

It’s always a combination of many different tactics and strategies to get traffic to your websites, especially if you have a small ad budget. That’s why I’ve suggested these ‘on-page’ methods – because they are free but also because they are very important aspects of SEO.

Use “Clean” HTML Code: A super diagram of beautiful, clean code can be found on this site... it’s too large to put inside this report and still be readable.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is including a whole script in the web page instead of linking to a script – the loading time is slower, the page is bloated, and your bandwidth usage goes up. (An example I can think of is a language translation script – and instead of linking to the script, the site owner put the whole script on every page – whew! That’s a lot of bandwidth just to load each page that someone wants to view on his site.)

Using

Use paragraph tags for your content

since it keeps your paragraphs distinct from one another. Use © for your © symbol and ™ for your ™ symbol. It looks much more professional than (c) and (tm) as I’m sure you agree.

You can easily validate your code online, making sure your site is in compliance with the standards and recommendations set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the web. Code validation helps to produce clean code. In general, cleaning up your HTML coding will reduce page size, make the web site search engine friendlier and increase accessibility.

If you're new to web building, I'm sure you're a bit blur about what you just learned in this lesson. But not to worry. In a couple of days, I'm going to introduce you to a tool that will make this super easy for you.

The next segment is an intensely appealing subject to every website owner – the addition of various monetization methods for your website, so keep looking forward.