by Julie Dancer

Created on: September 21, 2010

Without traffic, a website is fairly useless. You cannot influence opinion, break news, or make money unless you have people who are actually accessing the information you provide. In the past, getting traffic was relatively easy, but now - with Search Engines improving the algorithms, and users far more internet savvy about finding what they want - it can be an uphill struggle.

Luckily, you can optimise your site for search engines. By applying some basic SEO techniques, you can not only increase traffic flow, but get better quality traffic - the kind of traffic that is actually interested in what you have to say.

1. Make sure search engines can access your content

It seems like a basic step, but it's one that is surprisingly easy to fall foul of. The easiest way to check is to use a tool like Feed the Bot to simulate the way a spider 'sees' your site.  If it comes up blank then you might have blocked your content - either by a badly configured robots.txt file, or by building your site in Flash or using mainly video. Text content is still the best, and you should try and provide a text alternative to images, video and flash content where possible.

2. Check your tags

While meta tags are not particularly important, they do provide some information to the search engine. The most important part is your title tag: <title>Your Website</title>. Make sure this contains one or two of your keywords or phrases. For example <title>Online Acupuncture Resources & Ebooks for Women</title>. 

You also want to include <meta name="description"> and <meta name="keywords">. Many CMS systems allow for these to be dynamically changed from page to page to reflect your content. This allows you to maintain short keywords across your site, but use different long-tail keywords for different pages. So a website with acupuncture resources would include 'acupuncture resources for women' on every page, but include 'descriptions of pressure points in acupuncture' 'acupuncture to help strengthen the heart' 'dangers of acupuncture' etc. on individual pages. These 'long-tail' key-phrases are very useful because there is less competition for them, and therefor it is much easier to rank highly for those searches. 

You can create long-tail key-phrases by simply becoming very specific. It is better to have six or seven very specific pages than one or two general information pages. 

3. Check your content

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