SEO Key Points

This is an article mainly for web site owners, who have just begun their online project and trying hardly to let the world know about it. They take all their skills, their time and every cent out of their pocket, in order raise popularity of their resource somehow.

What a nice idea – to have your website promoted and see the world of people? What great challenge is it, unless you are multinational corporation, with infinite budget? Here we will try to review some ways to do it, and we hope that you comment us back, on something we have missed.

In fact, the whole process of SEO comes down to two major points:

• Visits of real people
• Backlinks from popular sites

Visits

There are many ways to bring more people to your website. But in order to choose the most optimal way, you really should sit down, write down those questions and try to answer them:

• What your site is about?
• Whom is it targeted to?
• Are you sure you can provide enough unique content, renewing it as often as possible?
• Who are your competitors?
• What do they do to promote their web sites?

Those questions are pretty much similar to standard Logo Design survey, as you can read in David Airey’s “Logo Design Love. A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities”.

“So, how do I begin?” – you ask. Well, let us try to describe imaginary site – SuperNewWebsite – and answer above-given questions about it:

What your site is about? Let’s say it is about Web Site Design. Good, so far we’re still here!..

Next question – whom is it targeted to? Naturally, if we talk about web design, it targets potentially successful beginner designers. So, we should provide them with tutorials and techniques on various subjects, such as: CMS selection, themeing, logo design, SEO plugins, etc.

Now, taken the subject is pretty popular, do you think we can provide unique content? Actually, we can, but this will require from us substantial time investment, since we have to find technologies and techniques that have not been described yet, or describe them better. Perhaps video tutorials could do? Perhaps, we could also sign up for news from modern Design related blogs, communities and companies producing software for designers, so we’d always have fresh content, that we shouldn’t spend too much time on finding.

In this very moment we come to the hardest point – who are your competitors? Indeed, there are thousands of people doing the very same things, just doing it differently. Your job here is to try and do it better than them. This world is too big for competition seekers, and no matter how high you go on top, somebody will always be higher.

But what you can do, is try to make something better than you made it yesterday – perfect your language, polish your web design skills and, naturally, promote, in communication with people.

Actually visits are all about communication. Yes, for sure you can drive visits to your site using paid advertising, but it will require significant funding. What if your site is personal? A blog, for example? You cannot spend all your money on something that is not really business-related. You can advertise here and there, but that’s it.

That is why the best way to bring visits to your site is to communicate with people, ask their opinions, seek that point to open a dialog between you and your potential visitors. You can do it in your university, or societies you belong to. You can also do it at Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, which are leaders of industry nowdays, and all easily cross-connectable.

Now once you did that, and you see many people visiting your site and talking to you, you won’t be able to resist checking your site’s rating, at popuri.us, for example. How surprised you will be to find it is still “there, between millions”? That is where backlinks are coming into the light…

Backlinks

Apart from casual advertising, there is nothing that raises your search engine popularity rating as backlinks from other, more popular sites. Backlink – is link to you. So, naturally, the more backlinks you have, the more popular you’re with-in search engines, the easier you’re found, and the more visits you have.

“So, what’s the catch?”

Catch is that popular sites rarely come down from the sky to give you a backlink. It is only natural, too many people want it, and so it would be unreasonable to just accept every “Tom, Dick and Harry”, for free, to be linked back. Imagine how internet would be flooded by spam then?

Anyway, to get your backlinks, you can exchange links with somebody or in some network, like VoltRank. You also can try web directories – which is fine, as long as they themselves have high popularity ratings. To check it, visit directory review sites, like VileSilencer.com and see latest updated list of known directories. You can easily check each directory with any page rank checker, and see if it really worth it.

Personally, we’d recommend SearchSight.com – as free directory, but thoroughly managed, and also with Google PR5, at time of publishing this article, and HRwebdir.org – paid, but also popular and highly rated (PR4) directory.

All directories will bring you backlinks, but they can also bring you a headache…

Avoid the scavengers

Internet is full of sites and people who will do everything to destroy their own, and what’s worse, your reputation. With backlinks, its linkfarms – sites containing hundreds of thousands of links, while their own rating among search engine equals to zero. Whenever Googlebot or BingBot visiting their site and find your link there, it makes a note to “lower down your rating”, hence you get back to where you started.

Another category of scavengers are copywriters – those who take your content, rewrite it a little and sell for money. It wouldn’t be a problem, if they’d actually work on rewriting, but reality is that most of them don’t, they just copy-paste and change headers.

So BE AWARE!