Almost everyone who owns a website wants as much traffic as possible. Often this is something that is taken for granted when a website is newly purchased. New website owners often have their websites built then expect loads of visitors by default, if you’ve been in this position you’ll know this is not the case. Website promotion is a skill in and of itself that complements a website and drives traffic to it.

So what do you need to do to prepare your website for promotion and search engine optimization?

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First you need to establish clearly who your market is and what keywords they a using to find you and other businesses in your sector of the market. Once you know this you can then focus on how to optimize your website so that search engines can read your content and determine that your website is highly relevant to the keywords your customers are searching for.

They do this by reading your website and looking for certain on page relevancy indicators such as Meta tags, headline tags, content engine links within or pointing to your website. If your Website developer has done their homework correctly selecting the right keywords and then creating pages that search engines can read and determine relevancy on, then you are already have a good foundation for ranking well in the search engines. The next thing search engines use to determine relevancy, is how many links are coming in to your website using your keywords as links. If are trying to rank for “keyword1” and you have 50 “keyword1” links back to your website and a competitor has only 20 links, then search engines may assume that your website is more important. The caveat on this is that when the search engines follow the link back to your website, search engines will expect to find a page which contains “keyword1” in its content and Meta tags and therefore determine its a highly relevant page to send searchers to.

As you can see search engine optimization and website promotion is really not rocket science, but more a case of understanding how search engines determine how important a website is, and then following a process of ensuring your website has all of the things required for search engines to determine that your website is the best choice for searcher and should be placed at the top of the search engine results.

If your website is not ranking well, then it’s a case of finding out who is ranking in the top results, and noting down what keywords and other factors they are using in their Web pages to get where they are and then mimicking their strategy.