Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly

Creating a site that is search engine friendly should be an objective of every company that wants to do business on the Internet. Search engines are the most common way for Internet surfers to search for something on the Net. In fact, 85 percent of all people who use the Internet use search engines as their primary way to look for information. By using keywords relating to your company in appropriate places on your site, you can improve how search engines rank you. You want these chosen keywords in the keyword meta-tags as well as in each page’s description meta-tag. Some of the other places where you want to have these keywords are your domain name if possible, your page titles and page text, your Alt tags for graphics, and your page headers. Many search engines place a lot of emphasis on the number and quality of links to a site to determine its ranking. This means that the more Web sites you can get to link to your site, the higher your site is shown in search engine results.

Including Repeat Traffic Generators on Your Site
Every Web site should be designed to entice its site visitors to return again and again. No matter if the primary objective of your Web site is to sell your products and services or to create brand awareness, generating repeat traffic to your Web site helps you achieve these goals. Generating repeat traffic to your site is a key element of your online success and can be accomplished in numerous ways. Using contests and competitions, as well as games, advice columns, and many more techniques, can increase your Web traffic.

Getting Visitors to Recommend Your Site
The best exposure your Web site can get is to be recommended by a friend or unbiased third party. It is critical that you try to have elements of your Web site recommended as often as possible; therefore, you should have a way for people to easily tell someone about your site and its contents. The best way to encourage people to recommend your site is to include viral marketing techniques such as a “Tell a Friend” button on your site. You might want to include some variations on this as well.

Under articles or press releases, you can have an “E-mail this article to a friend” button for people to refer their friends and associates to your site. Virtual postcards are also a good way to get people to send more people to your Web site. There are many ways to encourage viral marketing.