Friday, September 23, 2005

More Tips on How To Get Visitors To Your Site

In a few hours my wife and I will be heading down to the local Red Lobster to dine with a group from our class at church. What we expect is a fun night out with other couples from the church to eat some great seafood and then head over to the Nicholas' home for dessert.

Okay, Dave. Enough, already. What does this have to do with getting more traffic to my blog?

It's simple, my dear Watson. The flyer we were handed at church was titled, "Couples Dinner Out - Red Lobster", along with a sub heading, "Dessert will follow at the Nicholas' home."

Okay, I'm still lost, you say.

Here's the deal. I didn't have to read the whole flyer to get the point. The headline told me everything, except for the time and date. And that's just it. You need to incorporate facts - headliners - for title of your posts. This carries a dual purpose. The biggest one is that it lets everyone know what the post is about.

Secondly, when people type in "web cam reviews" in Google, if title of your post that day was, "The Latest Web Camera Reviews", Google will direct people to your site because your post title contains the keywords the person is searching for.

A nice thing about blog software is that the post titles go into HTML as h3 tags. Like...

How to Raise a Parakeet



Now what is so cool about this is that search engines are notorious for returning results from pages that have keywords in the H tags, like h1 h2 h3, etc. Make it a habit to think like a newspaper editor and create a title to your post that explains what the article is about, but at the same time is concise and carries words you know people will search for when looking for your content.

If you can, make good use of your ALT tags for your images. You can't do this with sites hosted on Blogger.com or a few of the blogging giants, but you can do this on independent sites. Now, don't be devious by keyword stuffing the ALT tag, just make sure you use it. Many people forget it.

And finally for today, make sure you have enough content on your page. Many search engines look for more content than HTML code. This means if you have a lot going on in HTML that has little or nothing to do with your content, try to bring the ratio down as much as you can. Use cascading style sheets and less clutter that has nothing to do with the subject of your blog.

Keep working hard at these optimization tips. Soon you will greet new visitors every day.

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