To draw traffic to my website(s), I need a bit of guidance as to how to work search engines (and which ones) and how to do keywords. I'm reasonably competent with words, but I'm a real novice with the technical side of computers and internet. I just try to remember which buttons I used when it worked correctly and do the same again.

Thanks.

Basically, if you're not in Google, you're not really on the web.

1. Google ranks your page by the number of (quality) pages that link to you. Trade links with other related web-sites.
2. Make sure to put meaty content at the top of the page, because Google indexes first 1500 words.
3. Put keywords in page title.
4. Don't use services that claim to improve your pagerank. You're just wasting money, and some may irritate Google such that you'll get banished.

Hope this helps,
WallyH

Building on what WallyH wrote... If you can get a good ranking in Google, you'll be fine in the other search engines. Approach every page in your site as a new SEO problem; have no more than 3 to 8 keywords, and use them in the keywords metatag, the description metatag, the browser title, and the H1 headers. Use them also in the first 150 words of text on your page. Be sure to match the description metatag contents and the keywords metatags to the content of the page, and don't use the same description & metatags on every page.

You need to have fresh content on your pages so add content and update often (that's why blogs are so popular: an easy way to always have fresh content). If you have a blog, register it at mybloglog. Try to get into dmoz.org (but they're very picky, you may have to wait until your site is a year or two old to get listed. Get links from other sites, but only if they're high quality and have great ranks themselves... and avoid "link farms". Create a Squidoo lens in your subject area and link to your site there. Do the same with a Facebook "fan" page. There are other ways to get good links to your site than link exchanges.

Create a Google sitemap for your page (you'll have to upload a sitemap file, to do this). Here's a free online sitemap generator.

Thanks vingogly. If I can get hold of the terms you use, I might be able to make some progress. Could you take another few minutes and explain some of them like "metatags" and "H1 headers?" I'm a real novice in website stuff. Appreciate it.

First of all, realize that what anyone says about Google and SEO is an opinion... Google keeps its algorithms for ranking pages to itself, and changes them without notice, so whatever people "know" about Google is inferred from analyses of actual results. That's why you'll see differences of opinions out there. The following is based on what I've learned over the past couple of years... and I've gotten my main site to rank in the top 10 on the Google searches that matter to me. So mileage may vary. I do know that getting a good ranking takes work and time, there's no quick, magic fix no matter what "experts" say.

Here's a short article that describes metatags. Keywords used to be important, most SEO articles I've read recently say they're not as important to search engines as they once were. Most everyone agrees, though that the Description metatag *is* important. Note from the example on the linked page that they go into the HEAD section of your page. How you would do this depends on what you're using to build your web pages: template based web site tools often have an option somewhere to set metatags.

There are H1 to H6 headers you can place in your pages. They're kind of like the header styles provided in a word processor like Microsoft Word. Some template-based web design tools have a place to specify a page header; this is usually the H1 header. Others provide a way to set the style for a line of text to H1 - H6. Again, it depends on what tool you're using. Here's a page that describes the headers and gives the code for them.

A "link farm" is a site that just provides a big list with a lot of links - it's thought Google and other search engines will penalize your site if they think it's listed on a "link farm". You might find yourself listed on link farms without your requesting to do so; not much you can do about that, but you shouldn't voluntarily request a link on a farm. Note that site directories like Yahoo, Google, DMOZ are not link farms and it's good to be listed on directories.

Links from sites like Squidoo, MyBlogLog, Facebook are helpful because these are "quality sites" in Google's eyes... they have high rankings themselves. Links from your brother-in-law's wedding site are not helpful, because it doesn't qualify as a "quality site".

A sitemap is very important... you've seen these on other sites (if not, look around at big commercial sites - they'll all have sitemaps, usually with a link at the bottom of the page). Google uses them to rank your site. To create a sitemap, you need a page with a list of your site's URLs, plus an XML site file that you upload. You also should tell Google that your site has a sitemap. Here's the Wikipedia entry on sitemaps; there are useful links at the bottom.

The little machine won't let me rep you again yet, so thanks again.:)

You're very welcome. And the statement about the link from your brother in law's site was just an example... I don't even know if you have a brother in law. :)

I have a very special brother-in-law. But he's much more likely to have a wood carving site than a wedding site. I think I hear you about the need for "quality sites" though. Thanks.

Some great info, vingogly. I've always wondered all this myself, except I tend to throw pages up and give people links and have never really put my "site" together and therefore just never got this far. But I will subscribe to this and save it. (I always wondered if those metatags were search engine stuff.)