Finding yourself at the top…

One of the biggest challenges facing web site developers is how to drive more traffic to the web site. To the surprise of the beginner or inexperienced web-designer, the adage, “Build it and they will come”, doesn’t work in cyberspace. We can build it, make it look as flashy and as creative as we like, but no one will visit the site if they don’t know it’s out there.

There are several ways for your target audience to find out about your site, including:

• Search engines
• Links from other sites
• Your own print or web marketing
• Pay per click (PPC) advertising
• Word of mouth marketing
• Social networks
• Other paid advertising

The method most people concentrate on here is the “Search Engines”, more specifically, search engine optimization (SEO). The very term is thrown around the web like  a miraculous cure-all to all our web problems, and I receive no end of emails in my inbox every week from companies and individuals promising to send my site rocketing to the top of the Google search list. What a load of baloney.

It would be nice if such strategies actually worked, but most of these so-called SEO offers are bordering on being scams. Sure, they have a whole arsenal of cyber-weapons that can propel your site to the top of the search list – for a short time, that is, until someone else does the same thing and sends you back down the list again. Worse still, Google et al are fully aware of these weapons and have a wonderful way of dealing with those who use them… blacklisting.

Google and the other search engines really have it in their best interests to serve quality results to the search requests they receive. They can’t afford to let the inmates run the asylum by trying to artificially distort the system. So, they are very wise to all the tactics employed by many of the SEO companies out there – to the point that your web site could be blacklisted entirely by the search engines if they feel you are trying to exploit the system.

So, for those of us who build and maintain our own web sites (artists, photographers, hobbyists and other enthusiasts), is there any way to do our own SEO? Of course there is! The phrase SEO was probably invented as a means to ensure that those privileged few web programmers, the ones with the darkest hidden secrets, kept their jobs – a technique long employed by the computing industry to deliberately mystify things to make sure regular folk still viewed programmers as some kind of magicians.

My aim with the following posts is to demystify some of this SEO junk to enable anyone to optimize their web site to get it the search engine ranking it deserves – without having to pay anyone a dime to do so.

The process is a bit like getting out of debt – it takes some actual hard work, it might take some adjustment and learning, but the end result is well worth the effort.

See you next time on how to actually start out…

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