For all those who have a web site but do not have a budget to hire professional SEO/SEM companies, I’ve compiled a list of some basic items which can help to get your sites listed and show up in the search results of search engines. Do remember that Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing is almost like rocket science and requires lot of efforts and patience  to achieve and maintain good position in search engines.

We all know that the Internet is numero uno when it comes to finding information. People across the globe are using the Internet to get ideas about products, compare prices, perform online banking, make purchases, etc. There are millions of web sites in this virtual world and people basically use keywords to get relevant information. When a search is performed on the search engine and if your web site is not listed in the search, it clearly means that you do not exist on the Internet. Why? Because the search engine results did not list your website and so people do not know about you. If you are still under the impression that once your web site is uploaded, people will find you – you are mistaken and its time to rewind and give this perception a kick.

So what does it take to get popular? How can we assure that people find us? The answer is simple – make search engines fall in love with your website. Here are some basic list of items that you can handle on your own to start with:

Title Tags: The title is what we see in the top left corner of our browser window. The title tag is one of the most important factor in achieving high search engine rankings. Ensure that the title tag provides as much detail as possible about your web site. Do not stuff the title tag with irrelevant information. Instead pick out relevant keywords from the web site content and put those keywords in the title.

URL: The URL is basically your web site address. For example, my website URL is http://www.vishalvasu.com. But if you are reading this post from a link, you will notice a longer URL. See how the URL is seperated by hyphes? It basically has keywords stuffed in there as I’ve planned by page name and directory structure to accomodate that. Again, do not overdo this as there are chances that search engine may penalize your web site.

Relevant Content: Playing around with keywords, title tags, etc. simply does not help until you have relevant content on your website to support the same. Remember – Content is the King. Make use of the right amount of keywords (keyword density), use few images and provide ALT tags for images as search engines cannot read images, make use of H1, H2 and H3 tags in the content. Generally the more useful, interesting and relevant content a website has the more successful it will be.

Periodic Updates: Search engines like fresh and new content. Not adding anything new to the web sites at regular intervals means stale content and search engines will lose all interest in your site. Think up of ideas to share product information, announcement of some weekly specials, news postings, newsletter marketing, blogging, etc. Periodic updates act like a good deo and attract the search engines towards your site.

Link Building: Search engines while indexing your web site look for other web sites which link to your web site. This way they try and build up the importance which in professional terms is called “ranking”. Try trading links with other websites which have similar or supporting content to your web site. For example, if your web site is selling gift articles, trading links with an online flower shop site could be benefical. Also, try and write some unique articles and submit them on the Internet to gain one-way backlinks. There is nothing as valuable as a one-way backlink from a high ranking web site.

Site Submission: Go ahead and submit your web site to search engines and directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, Google, etc. Also, try and submit to lot of relevant business directories on the Internet. There is lot of hidden benefit to this.

That being said, hopefully you should be able to get some good traffic.

Thanks for reading and good luck!