SE Optimization: Summer’s Internet Traffic Jam

Summer’s Internet Traffic Jam

Written by Rob Young

Summer is finally here, and while for many, summer implies barbeques, school-break, vacations and trips to repparttar

beach; for most Internet businesses, summer implies slower traffic.

For an online business, traffic is paramount. Without it, conversions drop off, ROI’s dwindle and businesses can fail. In repparttar 127924 United States, netScore reported that seventy-four percent of repparttar 127925 top 50 Internet properties experienced less traffic between May and June of 2001. A big reason for this huge reduction is repparttar 127926 decrease in at-school Internet traffic. Visitor traffic from at-school computers, which represented almost 8% of U.S. Internet traffic in May, began declining as summer vacations started and decreased 40.5% in June compared to May. Traffic doesn’t see an increase until mid-August. This means that for nearly four months, online sites are not seeing repparttar 127927 traffic they so desperately need.

International Web usage is seeing declines in repparttar 127928 summer months as well. Between mid-May and July of 2002, Russia reported a twenty-percent decline in summer Internet usage. Sweden saw its summer traffic stifled by eighteen-percent as early as July 1999, and many other countries around repparttar 127929 world are feeling repparttar 127930 hit of summer traffic reductions as well.

Seasonal traffic fluctuations are a recent phenomenon. The first few years of Internet usage saw such rapid growth in both repparttar 127931 number of users and repparttar 127932 number of pages visited, that seasonal variations were hardly noticeable. In recent years, however, Internet growth rates have slowed dramatically as repparttar 127933 United States and repparttar 127934 rest of repparttar 127935 world crawls towards repparttar 127936 user saturation point.

Feed me - Satisfy the Search Engines and Your Site's Visitors With Keyword-Rich Content

Written by Julia Hyde

Search engines love content. Graphics may make your site look great, but a nice picture does not attract a search engine. Or a searcher for that matter. Good, relevant content does.

Search engines aren't all that different from people. When faced with a ton of choices, they want to know which sites are repparttar best. And, repparttar 127923 best sites are repparttar 127924 ones that give repparttar 127925 most accurate and relevant information.

Good content serves three main purposes:

1. Search engines will rank your site higher for keywords and phrases included within your content.

2. Users will return to your site, and recommend it to others

3. Other sites will link to you, which will improve your linking popularity and make your web site visible to repparttar 127926 spiders.

But, how do you get good content? Simple. You write it, or get someone else to write it for you, using keywords and phrases your visitors will actually use on a search query.

Feeling a little hot under repparttar 127927 collar? Relax. It's not as difficult as it sounds. Anyone can learn to write for crawler search engines. It just takes a little planning, detective work and focus. Ready to begin? Follow repparttar 127928 steps below and you'll be writing like a pro in no time.

1. Determine which keywords and phrases you want to target

Before you sit down to write anything, you'll need to decide which keywords and keyphrases are relevant to your site. One of repparttar 127929 best ways to do this is to use repparttar 127930 Word Tracker keyword tracking service at www.wordtracker.com. Word Tracker receives its data from repparttar 127931 Dogpile and Metacrawler search engines and estimates search counts for all other search engines based on its market share. You can sign up for a day, a week, a month or a year.

Another good way to find keywords your visitors are using is to look at your site's server logs. These will tell you what phrases people are using to find your site. Some keywords will be too competitive. For example, repparttar 127932 keywords "real estate" will return hundreds, if not thousands of search results, and may not place your site near repparttar 127933 top, but "Houston Real Estate" or is more focused and targeted to a particular query.

If you want your site to be included in local and regional searches you may want to design your site with local searches in mind, even if you also market globally. How do you do this? Just include local keywords such as address, city, state, province and zip code in repparttar 127934 header or footer of your web pages. For example:

XYZ Business Consultant, 3657 Acacia Avenue, Santa Cruz, California 95067. Tel: 408 746 8954. Located close to San Jose, CA.

That way you have a much better chance of getting a first page listing on a localized search.

2. Scatter your chosen keywords and phrases throughout your text.

Let's say one of repparttar 127935 keyphrases you want to target is "cotton duvets". You'll want to weave this phrase throughout your copy without making it sound stilted or contrived. Remember, you still need to persuade your prospects to buy your product, so don't be tempted to write paragraphs like this:

Cont'd on page 2 ==>