Earning money with your own website requires one major need: traffic. You need it. Not just any low-quality traffic you buy from online advertising companies, but high-quality visitors interested or ready to buy from you. Search engine traffic can do this for you, simply because the visitors who find your site have searched for what you are selling. To make sure you don’t miss out on this valuable source of traffic, your website needs to be highly visible to search engines.
Search engines are extremely vital to many Internet businesses that depend on their traffic to make money. You can take advantage of what the search engines can offer you by making sure that your website is visible to the engines. These search engine companies use software known as spiders or search robots. These programs crawl the web and simply register websites to be indexed in search engines. There are several easy steps you can take to avoid common mistakes and issues that will make you invisible to search bots.
Did you know that search engines ignore images, graphics, and videos? True, they can only classify the text. So, if your website contains a large number of images and animations with a small amount of visible text, you might as well disconnect your computer from the Internet because search engines won’t find it anyway. Also note that text embedded in image files is also unreadable. If you’re not sure if the text on your website is readable, you can check your site’s source code. If you don’t see the text in the HTML, guess what? Search bots won’t see it either. The text is key. The more text your site has, the better it will be. So resist the urge to “enhance your site” with all those fancy graphics and animations and stick to basic text with fewer graphics. Also, a website loaded with graphics and animations can be very annoying for visitors.
The most important text to have on your website is your keywords. You need to analyze which keywords are relevant to your site and predict which ones people will type into search engine boxes to find your site. Keyword analysis is beyond the scope of this article, but it is something that you should investigate further. The most important thing to know about keywords is where to place them on your website. Your title should contain your best keywords. Search engines base which keywords are most important to a site when determining its relevance. The more relevant it is, the higher the rank it is assigned and the more likely it is to show up when someone searches for it. Therefore, it makes sense to put good keywords in the title, as it usually describes what a website is about. Your site description should also contain your main keywords. As a general rule of thumb, the closer a keyword is to the top of the page, the better chance it has of ranking well in search engines. However, you should not ignore putting keywords in the middle or bottom of the page. Search engines also look at how often keywords appear on the web page before determining their relevance. Don’t overuse keywords. Search engines could penalize you if a keyword is repeated several hundred times within a page. Be moderate but consistent when placing your keywords.
Finally, don’t waste your money on companies that claim to give your site a higher ranking on the big search engines or that will submit your site to thousands of engines to save you time. No one can guarantee you a top listing. The good classification is determined by factors outside the reach of any company. Actually, you only have to submit your website to a few of the many search engines. Most of the searches done on the Internet come only from Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are the only search engines you really need to pay attention to.
You don’t have to shell out a ton of cash on low-quality traffic that just doesn’t convert to profit. Search engines can produce much better quality traffic for you. Being highly visible to search engines is critical to ranking well with them. The higher you rank, the more likely people are to find your website and that of course means making more legitimate money online. If you create a highly visible website that search engines love, then you will benefit from a steady stream of interested visitors. Good luck to you and your success!