These days search engines are king. If your site is coming up in search engines or if you’re not driving traffic to your website, then you’re missing readers.

Here are some easy-to-implement techniques that will improve your search engine rankings and help more readers discover your writing:

Links, Links, and More Links - Arguably the single most important way search engines determine the quality of a website is by counting the number of other websites that link to it. To search engines, more links mean better content. If you consider each link to your website a vote in favor of the quality of your content, then the most votes win. The prize is better positioning in search engine rankings. But beware, the quality of each of the links are also evaluated. For example, a link from the Washington Post website to your website will help you more than a link posted on a one-day-old website. And sometimes having your website posted on services that guarantee thousands of links, called link farms, can actually work against you.

Keywords - People enter keywords into search engines to find websites that contain relevant content. Therefore, if you want your website to come up in search results for certain keywords, then you need to be sure those keywords appear multiple times on your site. For each of your web pages identify the most important keywords for the content on the page. Use the selected keywords as many times as possible to meet the needs of search software while still retaining the readability and professionalism to meet the needs of humans. Make sure your keywords are in the title of your page, headlines, body content, and meta tags for every web page. Remember, keywords can also be word combinations, such as “search engine optimization.”

Quality Content - Search engine companies strive to provide people with the most useful search results. The goal is to give people the specific information they want, placing the highest quality content first. If you use informative, well-written web content that is focused on a particular topic, the search engines will find you. Use your keywords as many times as possible on each web page (again, balancing the needs of search engines with the readability of the page by humans—there is a trade-off unfortunately).

File Names - One place where search engines look for keywords is in the file name of each web page on your site. Give each of your pages a file name that reflects the content found on the web page. For example, a web address of

www.YourSite.com/Detailed-Information-About-This-Page.html

will do much better than

www.YourSite.com/2340.html.

Page Title - The title of web pages is displayed on the very top of web browser software. Similar to the File Name, the Page Title of each of your web pages is used by search engines to gather information about what is contained in the body of a page. Each web page should have a unique Page Title. Your Page Title and File Name should be similar if they are accurately summarizing the information on your web page.

Headlines - Headlines are important cues for readers and search engines alike. Incorporate your keywords in the headline to improve search engine results. For example, using the keyword “search engine optimization,” the first headline could be “What is Search Engine Optimization?” followed by “Why is Search Engine Optimization Important for Authors?” and so on.

Meta Tags - Meta tags can be inserted into the HTML code of each web page to provide information to search engines. This information does not actually appear on the visible web page itself. Although the importance of meta tags is decreasing, they can and do still play a role in search engine optimization. The two most important meta tags are the meta-description and the meta-keywords tags. The description tag allows you to briefly describe your web page (make sure you use your keywords) and the description often shows up when search engines give a page synopsis in the search engine results. The keyword tag assists the search engine by identifying the main keywords for the web page (again, make sure every keyword in your tag can also be found on your page).

Your meta tags should be placed <TITLE> tag in your HTML code and there are no closing tags.  Customize the bold section in following tags for your site and paste them into your web page code: 

<META name="description" content="a description of your page">

<META name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc">

Pitfalls to Avoid - Some people try to inappropriately manipulate their pages to improve their search result rankings. Search engine companies design their software to filter out such abuses. If your site contains any of these manipulative tactics your site will possibly be banned from the search engines. Therefore, do not:

• Hide keywords on your pages (by using matching font and background color)
• Engage in link spam (placing links to your site on irrelevant pages)
• Use redirects from other URLs (unless it is thoroughly appropriate)
• Hide links on other websites to your site
• Attempt to do anything that smells of “tricking” the search engines

Combining good content with the techniques listed above will make it much easier for more people to discover your writing.