Posted on August 09, 2009 by Brett

The key objective of any web site should be to attract visitors and before you build your web site you should have an understanding of how you are going to attract visitors. Whether your website is commercial or not then sooner or later you are going to want to attract visitors. You should devote your energies to getting the search engines to direct as many visitors as possible to your web pages. The best type of visitor traffic comes from search engines as it’s free and it’s targeted.

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Search engine revenues rely upon the accuracy and relevance of the results they deliver to their users. Searchers will return over and over again to a search engine that delivers the most relevant results. More users returning, means more popularity and more sales. The challenges are the exactly the same for you and your website.Position yourself in the mind of your users as a relevant source of information and make them visit over and over again.

So what exactly must you do?. There are two key ways you can do this. You can submit high quality content to the web or you can use advertising often called Pay Per Click (PPC) or in the case of Google ‘adwords’.

Search engines have a simple philosophy that nothing exists on the web without a keyword or a key phrase . Searches always begin with the entry of a keyword or phrase into the ‘search box’. The search engine goes and looks in its vast index of web pages and selects the most relevant web pages and then returns them in a list that is ordered in terms of relevance and authority. The search engines decision about what pages to display in the results are based upon two key factors relevance and authority.

Authority is determined in the main by search engines view of how many back links a web page has and relevance is related to the presence of keywords in the content of the web page(s). The order of the list of results displayed by a search engine are conducive with the authority and volume of the back links to each page.

Back links are the number one priority you should focus on in web page optimisation.

Back links not only determine your position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but are a major source of visitor traffic. Users will follow links they find in content if the back link is labelled with relevant text. ‘Anchor text’ is the name given to the text label on a back link and is used by the search engines in assessing the value of a back link. Whilst all back links are of value some are more valuable than others.

Back links from web pages that contain content related to your web page have an impact on the authority of your web page.The higher the authority of the linking pages, the higher is the authority passed to your pages.