If you have just setup a new website or your small business has just gone “live” for the first time then I hope I can help you save money.

Once your website is live you may of course wonder why you are not receiving tens of thousands of visitors. Surely everyone needs or wants your product or service? A little rule, even if you were giving out free gold bars very few people would know about it – although I imagine your website would become popular by word of mouth – that’s a whole other story!

How do I get traffic to my awesome website?

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. PPC (Pay Per Click)
3. Affiliate Marketing
4. Social Marketing
5. DM (Direct Mail)
6. Email
7. Word of mouth

The bad news is that most of these options will cost you money, and to achieve large numbers of targeted traffic it will cost a lot! I will attempt to give you new websites some very basic tips to follow and implement that a lot of “SEO companies” would charge well over £1000 for.

Some basic tips

You will of course need some basic HTML knowledge for this, although some points require no prior experience.

1. Make each page Title unique to the page; keep the length to 60 characters or under. Any more and the search engines will not list the words in the results but you will see little dots…

Example:

<title>Important Keyword | Relevance Word | Company Name</title>

2. Create a Meta description that describes your page in a readable format; consider it a window to your larger shop.

Example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Important Keyword is a service or product in the keyword industry by company name.”>

3. Create a Meta Keywords tag, and include words that might not appear in your copy and misspellings of your keywords.

Example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”related keyword, 2nd related keyword, related industry, misspelled keyword 1, misspelled keyword 2 “>

4. Make your <h1> tags contain the most important keywords on each page – only one <h1> tag per page.

<h1>Keyword</h1>

5. Make your <h2> tags contain your less targeted keywords

<h2>Less important keyword</h2>

6. Give all your images “Alt” descriptions, these should describe the images perfectly

<img src=”imagelocation.com” alt=”Keyword in a situation” />

7. Create an XML sitemap

Visit: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ - to have one generated for you

8. Submit your XML sitemap to each webmaster console

Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Yahoo – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
MSN – http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster

9. Submit your website to a list of trusted directories. A good list can be found here:

http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/

10. Make any links on your site include keywords rather than “click here” or “read more”

<a href =”URLdestination.com”>Keyword</a>

The list above is just some basic standards to follow. Of course if you have a good website built for you then some of these will not be an issue, you will be surprised though.

Find some free backlinks

It amazes me how lazy some people are, I see many “SEO companies” charge anything between £50.00 – £1000 just for 250 backlinks – these often tend to be non-relevant so actually do very little for your search rankings.

This is how I find relevant backlinks, granted it may be time consuming but it’s cheaper or often free and the results actually work.

1. Go to http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
2. Enter a competitors website
3. Look at the results

You will often find free resource sites and directories that carry some weight using this tool. If not you will see where “the enemy” are getting their links from – which you can follow.

You can also use another tactic whereby you write comments on blogs that count as backlinks:

http://www.dofollowblogs.com/
http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/2007/07/20/over-160-relevant-link-following-blogs/

To finish this post off I will just add a few more tips, more server side that are always recommended. I would guess for sure that if you implemented all I have listed here, a new, un-optimised website would benefit from it (I guarantee that some SEO companies will charge well over £1000 for this sort of work)

Final Tips

• Implement a 301 redirect on your domain, if you do not know how, visit the link below:

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

• Make sure your URL structures contain keywords:

Example: http://www.yourdomainwithkeyword.com/productnamewithkeyword

As you will all know by now yesterday saw the third PR update in 2008 and we are only in April. The majority of webmasters will care more about SERPS more than PR but if you monitor your site enough you will see some correlation involved.

A few months ago I entered the “Yicrosoft Directory” competition at SEO Noobs dot com, although I didn’t win I implemented a some standard SEO practices on a standard WordPress theme and built up under 100 backlinks with 3-4 variations of anchor texts.

Now what is strange is that on reflection on the new update I looked at my site which I hadn’t touched in months or even accessed. To my surprise the little green bar was displaying a PR4, I then proceeded to look at the PR for the top 4 sites under “Yicrosoft directory” and their page ranks were all 4-6. Quite high I’m sure you will agree for websites that are only a few months old about a subject that was made up. This is also not the first time blogs and websites have received high PR updates on young domains.

Now what I believe Google to be doing here is ranking based on an industry level. Say for example you want to rank for a competitive term such as “bank loans” – you may have a 3 year old domain, 50k backlinks and an SEO friendly website, however you still only have a PR of 3 or 4.

Matt…what are you talking about – explain yourself immediately?

Ok, stay with me here – If you have a new keyword phrase, as we all played for (Yicrosoft directory) then out of all websites competing for the term the distribution is shared.

For example:

“mortgages”
• Position 1 – PR 6
o Backlinks: 3 Million
o Domain Age: 2001
• Position 50 – PR 4
o Backlinks: 6,000
o Domain Age: 1996

“Yicrosoft Directory”
• Position 1 – PR 6
o Backlinks: 2,000
o Domain Age: Feb 2008
• Position 50 – PR 2
o Backlinks: 273
o Domain Age: Feb 2008

I know I have only used 4 examples here but you can see the PR’s match but what doesn’t match are the backlinks and domain ages.

So I guess what I’m trying to explain here is that for your website to rank well in the SERPS and achieve a high PR in competitive industries is a lot harder than on less searched terms. Although this conclusion is far from revolutionary, it does explain why new websites and blogs are ranking highly in Page Rank. To me this indicates the up most relevancy and value of a link to your industry or service, random PR links may not be as valuable to you if they are not directly related.