Search engine traffic still remains the largest source of traffic on the Internet. Google.com, the foremost Internet search engine alone has over 150 million people using it each month to search for information.

Most people who use the Internet for information seeking don’t usually know before hand the websites from which they could get the information. Hence, they rely on search engines to help them bring out the best websites that contain the information they are looking for.

Therefore, if your website or blog is well optimized to attract search engines, you could be having a sizeable quantity of the traffic that use them monthly. Depending on the niche your website or blog is focusing, you could be having hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people visiting your site every month from the search engines. With such huge traffic, which is free, making big money from the site easily becomes a reality.

Now, the main issue is having your website or blog well positioned to rank high on the search engines, and so be able to get a huge chunk of the traffic from them.

A lot of newbies to the Internet just set up websites or blogs, and leave it, hoping that people who are interested and looking for information in their subjects will find them somehow. No, it doesn’t happen that way. There are certain things you need to do on your new (or old) website or blog to be able to bring in search engine traffic.

Before looking at these things, I will like to say that we will be limiting our optimization only to google search engine. Google is the largest of them all, and if you could optimize your site for google search engine, it will also reflect on the others, such as yahoo and MSN.

Tag Your Site For Search Engines

After your website or blog is designed, you need to tag it so that search engines can easily recognize what it is all about. If you didn’t tag it, it will not be possible for the search engine to index or display it in its search result because the search engine cannot figure out what the site is offering.

There are two important tags you must input on your website or blog after you have designed it, to tell the search engine what it needs to know about the site to enable it to index it when a search for related keyword to its subject is made. These are “meta name description”, and “meta name keyword” tags.

“Meta name description” describes your website or blog to the search engine, telling it what your site is about. This description should have your keyword in it. Below is the meta name description html code you should have on the header portion of your site:

The second tag, “meta name keyword”, shows a list of relevant keywords to your site. It further helps the search engine to know what your site is all about. The html code for the “meta name keyword” tag is

As I mentioned above, both Meta tags should be at the header portion of the website or blog.

Set Your Permalink Structure

If you are using WordPress blog and haven’t set your permalink, if you click on any of your previous posts you will see it reads something like: http://example.com/?p=N , where N is the Post ID number.
This is the default Permalink that WordPress will display for that page. But this does not help you as long as the search engine is concerned. It doesn’t say anything about the kind of information you have on that page, and so the search engine will not index it if someone searches for the kind of information you have there – and there goes your traffic!

If you have set up your Permalink, the URL of that page will describe the page by showing the title of the article on it, which would contain relevant keywords. The URL will look something like this:

http://NAME.com/blog/category/internet-marketing-ideas-tips/page/2, where “internet-marketing-ideas-tips” is the title of the article.
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If someone was searching for internet marketing ideas, this page would definitely be index by the search engine because its url has internet marketing ideas.

Apart from your posts, if you have your Permalink set up, it will also reflect in all comment and archive pages.

To set up Permalink structure for your blog, you would need to log in to your admin panel of your WordPress Theme, then go to Option (or Settings for recent version of WordPress theme). You will find the Permalinks link there, click on it and you will be taken to the Permalink page where you can set up Permalink structure for your blog.

There are different Permalink formats given that you can choose from, such as the ones that will make your blog pages read like: http://example.com/category/post-name/, http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name, or http://example.com/achive/post_id/

And if you want to customise your Permalink, including making it to end in .htm, there is a box you will type in the format you desire in this manner: /%category%/%postname%/%post_id%.htm

By /%category%/ it means the URL will show the category in which the post is made; %postname% means the URL will show the title of the article on the page; %post_id% means that the URL will show the page ID, which is the page number.

Although the URL of this page http://NAME.com/blog/category/internet-marketing-ideas-tips/page/2 takes the format /%category%/%postname%/%post_id%.htm, you can use any other format, but use the one that has the %postname% tag so that the title of the article on the page, which contains the keyword of the searcher, will be shown.

Get Listed On Search Engines

After your website or blog is launched, the next thing is to get it listed on search engines. You see, without being listed, there is no way the search engines will index and display your site whenever someone makes a search for your subject. It doesn’t matter how long the site has been up, it will never get traffic from search engines.

To confirm if your site is index on the search engines or not, type the url of the site, “http://www.NAME.com” in google search engine. If your site doesn’t come up in the displayed result, it means it hasn’t been index – it is not listed in search engines.

There are different ways you could list your site on search engines. One of them is to use the search engine’s listing tool found on their website. For instance, google has a listing tool at www.google.com/addurl.html that will enable you to submit your site’s url, and get it listed in the search engine. However, I no longer use this method, and I don’t recommend it because it takes too long for websites to be index from their listing tool, it could even take months.

I will therefore discuss the other ways, which are faster.

1. Use Other People’s Blog’s or Forums

You can get your website or blog easily index in google and other search engines by visiting and making comments or other peoples blogs or forum related to the subject of your site. Blogs and forums that have large followership and high google ranking give faster result. However, make sure that the blogs or Forums allow links to be placed on them.

That is, if someone clicks on your name field from a comment you made on a blog, they will be taken to your site. And in the case of forums, the forum should allow you to leave a link to your site in the signature box.

Having a link from blogs or forums to your site enables search engines to index your website or blog in a couple of days. This is possible because, as the search engine spider crawls the blogs or forums where your link is, it finds your link, follows it, and gets to your site, and then crawls it too. It relays the information that it got from your site to the indexing portion of the search engine software, which indexes it in the search engine.

To make it appealing for the search engine spider to follow your link on blogs and forums, you need to put the main keywords of your site in the anchor text. The anchor text is the text that is highlighted, and from which one is taken to your site when clicked.

In the case of blogs, the anchor text is what you type on the name field. Instead of writing John on the name field when leaving a comment, it will be better to type something like “John @ Make Money Online” if your website is about making money online. After you have submitted your comment, and it is approved, “John @ Make Money Online” will appear as your name, and when clicked will lead to your site.

If someone makes a search for how to make money online or related topics, the search engine spider crawls all the websites listed in it for the information that the searcher needs. As it crawls the blogs or forums where your link is, it finds your link, and noticed your anchor text is related to what the searcher is looking for.

This suggests to it that your site might contain the information the searcher needs. So it will follow the link, get to your site, crawl, and index the relevant page(s) to be displayed in the search result for the searcher to check out. Having crawled and indexed a page or two from your site automatically makes your website or blog to be listed in it.

2. Submit Articles to Article Directories

When you submit articles to article directories like ezinearticles.com, buzzle.com, goarticles.com, and articlesfactory.com, there is provision for you to leave your link at the resource box at the bottom of the article. And when people come to these directories and borrow your articles to put on their websites, you will be having links from all the websites that have your articles pointing to your site. Again, when search engine spider crawls the articles on the different websites where they are posted, it will follow the links to your site and list it also.

3. Using Old Sites

Another way you can list your blog or website faster is to place a link to it from an old website or blog, or exchange link with someone else. That is, you ask someone to place the link to the new site on their site, while in return you will place theirs on your old site. Notice that the higher the page ranking of the page where your link is placed, the faster it will be listed in the search engine.