So you have a website but you do not have any traffic to the site. What do you do? There are several ways to get traffic to your website and all of them have advantages and disadvantages. Search engine optimization can have one of the highest return on investments of any of these options but also can take the longest.
Search engine optimization is the art of onsite optimization and off site optimization. Both are very different and need to be approached in different ways. I will briefly explain both and what you can expect if you decide to do seo yourself or hire a firm to do the seo on your website.
Onsite optimization – This is all optimization that is done on the actual website. This will include meta tags such as title tags, description tags, keyword tags, alt tags and etc. Typically, anybody who goes to your website will not be able to see these tags as they will be behind the scenes or in the code. This is real geeky stuff.
It will also include the sitemap.html, sitemap.xml, and canonical. You want geeky well here you go. These are important because we are basically telling the search engine spiders how to read your website.
Offsite optimization – This will include back links to your website, social bookmarks, directory submissions, and etc. You want back links to your site but you also want to do it the correct way. What I mean by the correct way is anchor text to your site. So if you are trying to rank for the term golf shoes you want the website that is back linking to your site to you use golf shoes in their link. This is not always possible to get but you want as much anchor text as possible.
Offsite optimization can also include your social profile. What I mean by social profile is your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and any other social website that you have developed a presence. The search engines are taking notice of social websites and it is a good idea to make sure you have a social strategy.
If you get search engine optimization down correctly you will reap the benefits for quite a while. When seo’ing your website please have patience as this is not something that happens overnight.