Every web site owner wants to increase search engine traffic. It’s free and the visitor is targeted to your subject matter, product or service. What more could you ask for in search engine traffic? The downside is that you need to understand search engine ranking methods and that is quite a challenge for many.

The number of opinions and “experts” on ways to increase search engine traffic is overwhelming. And regardless of what anyone might tell you, they’re all guessing. The search engines themselves don’t divulge how their methods work for one simple reason. As soon as anyone figures out the method, there’s a mad rush to implement changes based on the method.

In a perfect world, where there were no scoundrels, this might not be a factor. Everyone would organize their web site information so that a visitor could easily find what they are looking for, and life would be good. But we certainly don’t live in a perfect world and scoundrels are everywhere.

So we are at the mercy of the search engines to help us sort through the clutter to find what we want. And that’s the value that the search engines provide, accurate and meaningful search engine results that are related to the search terms or phrases. So it goes back to the quality of content, that’s the only common factor in all 3 major search engines’ ranking methods.

Each of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) search engines use a little different method and technology to arrive at any given web site’s ranking under specific search terms. As mentioned above, no one knows exactly how each method works. But you can test different strategies and methods to see how they impact your rank.

And therein lies the only true method of determining what the search engines might look for when ranking your web page on specific search terms. I’m sure most of us are aware that most processes can be expressed in mathematical equations. I’m not sure if that’s the best method for search engine ranking, but it is the most popular for the search engine ranking process.

And consider the fact that when someone has determined (or thinks they have determined) one of the factors used in search engine rankings they beat it to death. Every discovered aspect in the past few years has been exploited immediately to the point of the search engines abandoning the tactic. As soon as the search engines see that someone can beat the system, they change it.

That’s one of the big reasons you see constant change in ranking methods. Since there is a tremendous amount of revenue at stake for all concerned, i.e. sales of products and services for the web site owners, plus the advertising revenue for the search engines, any advantage is huge.

If you would have tested and tracked all the changes and methods in search engine rankings for the past few years, one constant factor would stand out. This is also one of the most misunderstood and often overlooked elements in search engine ranking for a specific term.

So what’s the one thing that the search engines can’t change about their mathematical algorithms? You got it, CONTENT! The search engines can play with the process, methods, or means to judge web site content. But, if web site owners stick to the basic philosophy of providing meaningful content, in relation to the search term, the impact of changes are far less, if even felt.

And that is where many web site owners run afoul of getting good search engine rankings. Many jump on the bandwagon with every new revelation in search engine strategies based on the latest changes. It’s the old forest and trees scenario, Internet style. Even if you get a slight advantage from all these “new” tactics, it will be short lived. As soon as the search engines catch on that you are working the system, they will change the system.

So the best way to increase your rankings for a particular search term is to provide meaningful information or content based on that search term. Here a few guidelines I’ve found that help:

• Make sure you focus on the subject matter (don’t try to satisfy too many terms with one web page).
• Get inside the searcher’s head – figure out what they want and give it to them.
• Be specific and provide details – don’t generalize and be descriptive.
• For a sales page use benefits and features to fully explain the problem and the solution.
• Update your information often – setup a schedule to update and add more content.
   

There are many sub factors that can have an impact on how well the search engine bots can determine the value of the content. The search engine bots are software programs that go out and “read” your web page and then provide the information to rank your web pages on what they discovered.

You’ll find many “experts” who will give you a hard list of items and how to present this information. And I don’t disagree with suggestions to include the search term in your web page in key areas like title, description, and font designations like H1. That helps the search engine software bots to determine the content.

But I’ve seen web pages with no meta-tags, title, or description but that had rock solid content and still had high search engine rankings on a particular search term. So make it easy for the search engines, but always remember that the content is the single consistent factor in search engine rankings.

There are a lot of different aspects to consider when trying to improve your search engine ranking, and increase search engine traffic. The keyword and phrase research, interpreting the search term or phrase to provide the best result, reviewing other popular web sites with the same intentions, linking to other like content web sites, and more. How you present the information and content is also an important issue.

But all those factors come after good content. So if you start with providing the best content, you can’t go wrong. After all, this is both an art and a science, not to mention a moving target. If you would like to learn more, please visit our other article links below.

By John Dow
Visit jd WebWorks, to see some recent case studies and get better results with SEO Web Site Design.

Introduction
Before you even think about opening Dreamweaver or your favourite html editor and start designing your site there are a few things I believe you need to do first. I am going to describe how to increase your work flow and give you some general tips and tricks that will speed up the design of your website project and help to get it showing up in search engines quicker. In future articles I will be going into greater detail of some of the topics I describe here. Now let’s get started.

Purchasing and Optimizing Your Domain Name
The first thing you need to consider is your domain name. I suggest that you don’t just use your company name, i.e. if your company makes tartan paint and your company name is “Hamish Paints” don’t go for the obvious choice of hamishpaints.com. I would try and come up with a keyword rich domain name. Some search engine optimizers (SEO) would say that having keywords in your domain name doesn’t make any difference to your listings but I disagree. Google will highlight your keywords in the search engine results page (SERPS), which leads me to believe that keywords do hold some weight, and besides it will make it clearer to the searcher what your site is all about.

What are Keywords?
Keywords from a search engine optimization (SEO) stand point are the key -words that are used to optimize your website for better listings on search engines. These are the words or phrases people are typing into the search bar of Google etc. to find websites relating to what information or products they may be looking for. Go to www.bruceclay.com and www.highrankings.com - two great websites where you can learn more about keywords and SEO.

How Do I Find and Choose My Keywords?
To find keywords that people may be using in search terms the first port of call should be the overture keyword selector tool and you can access this tool at http://inventory.overture.com or http://inventory.uk.overture.com. If you want the UK results, here you will find an excellent tool for discovering keywords. All you need to do is type in words or phrases that are going to be related to your website and Overture will show you related searches that include your term and how many times that term was searched in the last month. Now you can get an idea of what keywords you should be including in your domain name.

Please note that search engines don’t like long domain names so try to keep it as short as possible. Other great resources for keywords are:

http://www.wordtracker.com
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

As we all know, all the good domain names have been taken and it’s almost impossible to get one-word domain names these days, so be inventive if you get stuck. I always find it helpful to visit www.dictionary.com and use the thesaurus to come up with names maybe I hadn’t thought of. Now that you are armed with a killer domain name you can go to http://www.umbrellawebsitedesign.co.uk/order/whois/ and check its availability.

Try and get the domain name extension of the country your company resides in as it makes it clear where you’re from. I know most people want to get a .com but, if you are in the UK, I believe a better extension would be .co.uk as it shows where you’re from. This will also help in the SERPS. When people are searching for websites in the UK you don’t want to be competing with websites outside of your country if you can help it.

Building a Holding Page and Creating a Site Map
Now that we are sorted with our domain name and hosting the next step involves creating a holding page and submitting a sitemap to Google. First of all you need to create your holding page. It’s a good idea to create a holding page so your domain can build up some respect with search engines. You don’t want to wait until your website goes live before submitting it to search engines.

Designing a Holding Page
Keep it simple and describe all the services and products you may be offering in your site. Don’t forget to use keyword rich text in your title tag, description tags, and body text. Use the keywords you discovered in the “how to find and choose keywords” section. This is good practice for when you design your website proper, but you have to remember it’s unlikely this page will be viewed by many people. However, this isn’t the purpose of your holding page.

A good idea here would be, if any visitors did visit your site, perhaps they would like to know when your website goes live or maybe they will have questions. I would therefore suggest you add a simple contact form asking for their name and email address to notify them when the site will be live or to answer any questions they may have. You could even use them to do some usability testing and describe in more detail the coming sections. Name it index.html or index.htm and put it in the root folder of your site and upload it to the server.

Creating a Sitemap for Google
A Google sitemap is a XML document that contains information of every page on your website (not to be confused with a sitemap html page on your website). You need to upload this to the root folder of your server so that Google can access it and index your website more quickly and easily. You can create a Google sitemap with very little effort online by going to http://www.sitemapspal.com and following the online instructions. Once you have created your site map you can go to www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ and follow Google’s instructions for adding a site map. You will find this service very easy to use and invaluable in getting your website listed properly on Google. Remember to update your sitemap XML document when your website is finished and every time you make changes so that Google can index your new pages. Doing this now will save you time and effort later.

Now Submit Your Website to the Major Search Engines - Right?
Wrong! It’s a misconception that you need to submit your website to search engines. Please, please don’t pay anyone to do this, as it’s not necessary. (Are you listening all you black hat SEO companies, shame on you). Once you have created a sitemap in Google this is more than enough to get yourself listed in the search engines. The search engines will actually come looking for your website in due course. Engines like Google and Yahoo serve listings to lots of other sites. For more information on this visit http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm. The one place you must submit your website is the Open Directory or DMOZ for short as this is where all the major search engines get their directory listings from. For more information on submitting your website to DMOZ visit http://www.dmoz.com/add.html .

Creating a Rough Draft of Your Site
Now its time to start designing your site. Before you go ahead and start creating a website in Dreamweaver you will need to get the layout and design in place first. If you want an easier way to design your site and you are not familiar with Dreamweaver or technically minded, you can always use website builder software to create your website. I would recommend this, if you are just starting out, as this is a quick and simple way to get your website up and running. For information on using website building software visit http://www.umbrellawebsitedesign.co.uk/web_b.html. However, if you want to get your hands dirty, read on.

The Pen is Mightier Than The Mouse
The first draft of your website should be on paper. Illustrate where your are going to put everything on your final page, including images, text and links, and name them for quick reference. This will save you lots of time later on in Dreamweaver. You can even sketch out a sitemap of all the pages in your website showing what page links to what.

Creating a PNG File
Now that you have a rough copy of your layout go ahead and open fireworks or image ready and start creating your site as a png file. Here you can start creating your logo and the graphical elements you plan to use. You can create your navigation and add your menus and text so that you can easily refer back to them once in Dreamweaver. Layout everything as it would look like in a browser. This is a good idea as it’s easy to make changes unlike in Dreamweaver where changes can be time consuming. Go ahead and save your page as a png file.

Well that’s it folks for part one. In part two, I will be creating a site in Dreamweaver, discussing cascading style sheets, usability, accessibility and validating your work to comply with W3G standards.

By Kevin Gallagher
Website design specialist Kevin J. Gallagher works with Umbrella Website Design in the UK.

Every website owner wants lots of traffic directed to their website, but this can sometimes involve spending a lot of time and money. Fortunately, most website owners can increase their return on investment simply by paying closer attention to their website log files. Most website hosting companies have special software installed that will process these website log files and display the information in an easy to read format. From this information website owners can get an understanding as to how many people are visiting the website, where the visitors are coming from, where they are entering and exiting the website, the average number of page views per visit, and many more interesting facts. These statistics will allow you to better analyze the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and give you some insight as to how you can tweak your website to increase your return on investment.

“Hits” Explained
There seems to be some confusion regarding the terms used to describe website visitor traffic. We usually hear website owners speak in terms of “hits” to their website. Hits don’t accurately describe the number of visitors viewing the website – they are actually just any sort of HTTP request made to your server. Not only are requests made for website pages, but also for all the images and other files associated with viewing a single page. Therefore, one page view could actually result in dozens of hits, and, if a single user visits many pages on your website, this visit could generate hundreds or even thousands of hits. This can excite some website owners, but this number is not a reliable indicator of how many people have actually visited the website.

The term that website owners want to focus on is the amount of unique impressions that are generated by their website. A unique impression will measure the number of actual people visiting the website based on their IP address, browser, and operating system. No matter how many “hits” a visitor registers on your website, the server will record the session as one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique visits gives us a much better idea of the amount of traffic the website is generating.

What to Look for When Analyzing Website Traffic
Number of Unique Visitors: We’ve already determined that the best measure of true website traffic is the number of unique visitors. What we want to look for is a trend in the average number of unique visitors. On a day to day basis, there may be a good amount of volatility in the number of unique visitors, but we want to pay attention to the trend of the average number of visitors per month. Optimally, we’d like to have the number increase on a monthly basis.

Entry Page Statistics: From these statistics we can learn which page people are using to enter your website. Most visitors will enter from your home page, but you may notice that up to 50% of your website traffic originates from a page other than your home page. It’s important that your website have an easy to use navigation structure to ensure that visitors can find the information they are looking for, even if they don’t enter through your website’s main page.

Bounce Rate: The bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave. Don’t get worried if your bounce rate is high – most websites have a bounce rate of about 50% or so. If the bounce rate is unusually high, you can experiment with your website to try and retain more visitors. Maybe you need more enticing graphics, less text, faster loading pages, or a more engaging design.

Exit Page Statistics: These statistics will show you where people are leaving your website. When you know which page is losing the bulk of your website’s visitors you can experiment with some changes in an attempt to retain more visitors.

Average Time & Page Views Per Visit: Website visitors are very goal oriented and task driven. Upon visiting your website, most visitors will merely scan the page to quickly determine whether or not it contains the information they are searching for. By analyzing the average amount of time spent on your website and the average number of page views per visit, you can determine how engaging your website’s content is. The key to retaining visitors and increasing the number of page views is to have relevant and interesting information on your website. Remember – content is king!

Top Referring URLs: This statistic lets you know where the bulk of your website’s traffic is coming from. This is important if you’re pursuing a website marketing campaign or search engine optimization campaign because you can easily judge the campaign’s effectiveness by looking to see how many visitors each marketing method is generating.

Top Search Words & Phrases: This information will let you know which keywords and phrases visitors are searching for in Google and the other search engines in order to find your website. With this information you can gauge the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign, or get an idea of how your website’s keyword density should be altered to position it for the keywords and phrases that you’re targeting.

Browsers, Platforms & Screen Sizes: This information gives us some insight as to the type of software and hardware your visitors are using. You should ensure that your website looks the same across all browsers and operating systems. In addition, you must pay attention to the screen size and resolution in which your visitors are viewing your website. The goal is to ensure that no visitor has to resort to the horizontal scrolling bar to view your website – this is a major turnoff for most people.

Country of Origin: A good website stats program will also let you know the geographic region of your website’s visitors. This is important if your website only has appeal in a particular region. For instance, if you own a retail store that caters to Southwestern Ontario and you notice that 90% of your website traffic is coming from the U.S., then it can easily be determined that you need to re-think your online marketing strategy.

The goal of website traffic analysis is to assess how well or how poorly your website is working for your visitors. From these statistics you can figure out what the problem is and try out some possible solutions. The problem often lies in the website’s visual appearance, layout, navigation structure, or keyword optimization. When making modifications to your website in order to remedy these problems, it’s best to only make minor and gradual adjustments, and then assess the progress over the next month or so to truly understand if your changes were for the better. Also, remember that sites with a greater number of visitors will have more accurate web statistics. Sites with smaller numbers of visitors are more prone to have their averages thrown off by a few anomalous visitors.

By Paul J Coulter
Paul Coulter owns and operates a Toronto Website Design company that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO).