Who wants a website without traffic?

I don’t know about you but I would have thought any business shelling out for a website, whether it be a pretty basic $5,000 job or an all bells and whistles $50,000 ‘Rolls Royce’, would expect, if not demand visitors – and hopefully lots of them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short), for detailed explanation see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization, is the technical name for making a website attractive for search engines (robots or crawlers) to visit regularly and by doing so getting indexed on Google, Yahoo and a growing number of new entrants.

These days if a website is not indexed it is virtually invisible on the web, i.e. does not appear high in natural or organic listings on search engine results page (SERP). Unless a new visitor or prospect actually knows your URL (e.g. YOC’s directory web address www.smartpages.com.au) and uses it to navigate to your site using the navigation (or link/s) bar at the top of the browser window, they will not be able to locate your website.

As recently as two to three years ago this would not have been a major problem, however search engines have now made such an impact on how people find information online it has rendered the tried and true navigation technique redundant. In fact it still works, but users are more likely to mistakenly enter the URL into the search bar than use the less used navigation bar these days.

Most web-designers insist that keywords should be inserted as meta tags at the top of all new web pages, and it is akin to SEO 101, but their relative importance is being questioned by some leading practitioners.

Since the exercise is at most only a 5-minute job of pasting a line of code into HTML (once the relevant keywords have been selected) it amazes me that some well-known website developers are regularly forgetting or overlooking this basic requirement for their clients.

Cynics might say they deliberately leave them out and then ask for an extra to insert them later as some SEO variation when the new site is ultimately launched and fails to attract significant traffic.

To me, omitting keywords on a website is analogous to an automobile manufacturer leaving seat belts out of a brand new car.  Yes, it might still have wheels, a motor, and all the other basic requirements to function, but realistically seat belts are essential, i.e. they are not really an optional extra.

However, as you will learn, adding keywords is only the beginning when it comes to the art or science of SEO – more in future GET CONNECTED columns.

Some common keyword mistakes

It is preferable to use your company’s products or services as keywords rather than categories, e.g. use the keyword ‘meat’ rather than ‘butcher’ – better still use both.

Always add plurals, i.e. ‘meat’ and ‘meats’.

Remember to add locality; not just your actual address or suburb but state and country as well. Also, nearby suburbs or areas serviced. Regions are less useful but it doesn’t cost anything to add words, so why not.

Don’t bother adding words in reverse order – that’s something the robots can work out for themselves, and don’t insert extra words between important keywords - that does confuse them.