There always seems to be a new, sure-fire way to drive traffic to your website. Sure, some of them work, but most are a total waste of time. The major search engines send out robot “spiders” or “crawlers” to index your website’s content. The most important strategy you can use is to insert keywords into your content and yet not change the context. There’s an art to it, and here are some tips for learning it.

Page Titles

Write a descriptive page title for every single page, and keep it down to 5 to 8 words. Remove as many filler words as you can and still have it make sense. These are words like “the,” “of,” “and,” and others. On your home page, use your business name along with descriptive keywords. Put these words first in the title, to gain keyword prominence. To a search engine, this title is your identity, so use it well.

Description META Tags

The description META tag is a sentence that should describe the contents of the text of the web page. It should use the main keywords and key phrases that appear on that page. Don’t include keywords that aren’t used on the web page. That can actually make it less effective. Make sure there are keywords at the top of the page, between the heading tags in the proper META tag format.

Keywords in Header Tags

Include keywords in the header tags H1, H2, and H3, or in the first paragraph. Search engines think words that appear in the page headline and subheadings are important, so make sure your keywords appear in a header tag or two. Search engines also expect your first paragraph to contain the juiciest keywords for the document. Other places to put keywords are ALT tags and maybe in COMMENT tags.

Keyword Focused Pages

Make sure there are several pages on your site in which a different keyword or key phrase receives the focus. Rather than listing all your services on one page, try making a separate page for each. This will result in the pages ranking higher for their keywords since they have targeted content rather than a bunch of general content.

Submit Page URLs to Search Engines

Submit your web pages to the major web search engines that constantly crawl the web. Some search engines are more important than other because they feed search content to other search engines and to portals. Go to the search engine site, and see if you can find a link that says “Add Your URL.” That’s where you submit them.

Submit Site to Directories

Submit your site to the free Open Directory Project at http://www.dmoz.com. It is overseen by a team of editors, and it provides content feeds to all major search engines. As a bonus, it provides a nice back link to your site from a site that Google recognizes as important.

Swap Links Legitimately

Find sites with content similar to yours. Find the name of their webmaster and get in touch with him or her. Politely ask for a reciprocal link, then put a “links” section on your site where you list these links you rustle up. Not everyone will respond in kind, but every little bit helps, and many sites are more than happy to swap a link with you.