How to Drive Traffic to Your Website Part 02

A Look at META Tags

Another important aspect of your site that can make a difference in your
site are meta tags. There are various types of meta tags, but the ones that
are most important
are the meta description and meta keywords tags. Let's
take a look at the meta description tag, which will look like this:

Meta Name="Description" Content="here you will put a short keyword rich
description of your site"

On most search engines, the words you enter will be what gets displayed on
the results page as a description of the site. Whether or not you have a
good meta description can make a big difference not only in your search
engine ranking, but whether or not seekers decide to visit your site. Your
meta description should be descriptive, alluring, and to the point.

Now let's take a look at the meta keywords tag. This tag looks like this:

Meta Name="Keywords" Content="your various keywords will go here"

There are some important things you should know before creating your meta
keywords tag. For one, your keywords should never exceed 500 characters.
More than 500 characters can lower your ranking or even get you in hot water
for spam. You also do not want to repeat the same keywords. Keywords
should be separated with commas, and be relevant to the content of your
site.

All About Content

Now let's talk a bit about site content. It's crucial that your site
contains quality content that's not duplicated elsewhere. Search engines
are becoming wise to duplicate content, and sites that contain it do not
receive good rankings. There are several reasons why duplicate content can
occur, and one of them has to do with PLR articles, or Private Label Rights
articles. PLR articles are articles that are normally sold in packages,
sometimes through a subscription service. The problem with these articles
is that so many different webmasters have access to them. If you find
yourself using PLR articles to create your site's content, it's crucial that
you rewrite the articles to make them unique.

You might have seen those sites that offer free articles for use on your
site. This may sound appealing, but it usually does more harm than good,
because of the duplicate content issue. Most of the time, you are not
allowed to change the content of these articles, making it impossible to
avoid having duplicate content. These free article sites do have some
benefits, however, which we'll discuss later.

On the topic of content, it cannot be stressed enough that quality content
is key to good traffic. Search engines look for sites whose content is
unique, of high quality, and added on a regular basis. If you're unable to
add pages of content to your site each day, consider hiring a professional
writer to do it for you. Good content is truly one of the most important
aspects of optimizing your site for search engines and getting the traffic
you desire.
Plus, visitors are more likely to bookmark your site and return to it
regularly if they know that the content is updated often.

You'll want to check your site thoroughly before submitting it to search
engines to ensure that you have no broken links, one of the most detrimental
factors to a site's ranking and popularity. You'll see on some sites that
webmasters have a link where visitors can report broken links if they come
across them.

Another important aspect of SEO is having a sitemap. Your sitemap page
should be linked from every page of your site.
In this sitemap, it should be easy to access the pages of your site. Sites
that contain detailed sitemaps are normally seen as more favorable by search
engines than those that do not.

Now that you've learned a bit about search engine optimization, let's look
at some of the other aspects of bringing traffic to your site.

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Steve Renner
Author, Marketing Expert
Marketing Director
The Affiliate Community
http://www.affiliatecommunity.com