SEO Advice

Author: Richard Pettinger

Search Engine Optimization means trying to get more visitors to see your website. Working on sites such as Poetseers and Write Spirit I have learnt a few things through trial and error. I am not a professional SEO but I have no products to sell these are my suggestions on things that have worked for me.

1. Choose titles words carefully. E.g a page ""love"" is unlikely to get any traffic from Google, there is too much competition. Creating a page called ""Rumi love poems"" has a much better chance of getting traffic because it is more specific

2. Getting External Links from other sites. This is very helpful for the website. It boosts its page rank. However Google is clever; it rates the quality of links. 100 links from sites who only have listings of link pages (a link farm) is pretty much useless. Getting a link in the middle of text from a good quality website with high PR is the most useful.

3. The link should be generally from related sites. A poetry site needs links from other sites. A link from Bob's Bingo is not much use.

4. Links should be natural it is not good to get 100 LINKS at once. Google thinks you've cheated. It should be a gradual process of e.g 1 a week or 1 a month. Generally buying links is not recommended, Google hates things that look like cheating. At worst your site may begin to attract penalties.

5. Links to the home page is best, but links within the site are still good.

6. Add unique content on a regular basis. This is very important and valuable to a website. It is also useful to add fresh material to the home page. There's no short cut to getting good rankings, at the end of the day you do need to have good material

7. Pages benefit from having relevant external links. E.g. A page about the poetry of Sri Aurobindo would benefit from having links to other sites about Sri Aurobindo. It is best to link to established sites with high PR (Page Rank). Linking to sites with PR = 0 is not good.

There are many rules and suggestion but the most important thing is that if your site has good unique content then it will do well, because people will be inspired to link to it without you asking. It is hard to get high rankings artificially and impossible to get high rankings overnight, it is a gradual process.

About the author: Richard is an economics teacher in Oxford and works on various websites such as Sri Chinmoy Songs Richard is a member of the Oxford Sri Chinmoy Centre and is also a good UK cyclist.