Search Engine Optimization and building traffic

[millsja]

I am a new member.
I just joined about a week ago (and am delighted to be here!).

I've got a question.
The other day I noticed a whole bunch of "keywords"
at the bottom of a website page.
A friend of mine said they were there for search engines to find.

Does this work?
And, is there anything extra I would need to do (some special HTML tag or something I might need to add to those keywords)?

My site is www.funnyflashfiction.com, and as you will be able to tell by visiting it, I'm not an experienced site designer.

But, I am learning, and would like to both improve the site and build some traffic.

Any help would be appreciated.

yours,

... Jim

[510bhan]

I don't know about the architecture of a site but SEO is big business. You need to include meta tags which would have the main selection of what that page/site is about -- sort of what else it would be linked under eg: trains/railways/Scotland/transport/travel -- take a guess about that site. Got the idea? Key words and key phrases need to appear 'organically' [you don't have to pay for the ranking] -- sounding as natural as possible and with relevance to the copy.

So if I was interested in finding out about steam railways in Scotland the words in the example I gave would probably give a reasonable high ranking result from the search engine. Look at results when you go to a search page. Sometimes you get spammers/scammers with results that come up such as trains/babies/perfume/medical supplies/Michael Jackson/health advice -- a whole string of unrelated garble that is really just an attempt to pick up traffic from random requests. Often it leads you to something quite different to your intended destination.

If your site is SEO'd the search engines will return it as a good match for the typed requests. When I write copy it usually has the keyword or keyphrase in the title, first sentence, middle section and closing sentence -- fitting as naturally as possible with the topic 150-600 words. The frequency of its occurrence will 'catch' it as being exceptionally relevant because of the numerou mentions . . . but it has to sound as if it is normal English. Near as dammit!

Because people often make typos or only use lower case, I have to try and create sentences with phrases like kitchen ceiling lights uk. It really drives me mad to keep uk in lower case, but that's what people type, so that's what the client wants. The phrase construction can be quite clumsy and it takes some head scratching to come up with a way of incorporating it in half decent English -- especially if there is no comma or any other modification allowed, it has to be exactly as research has shown people run their searches.

[Maimi]

Hello Jim,

Here's a post you might find useful:
http://www.mywriterscircle.com/index.php/topic,38406.msg668259.html#msg668259

[millsja]

Thank you.

Your suggestion led to a whole series of articles ... some of them very helpful!

I appreciate your help.

yours,

... Jim