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SEO Advice

from: 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 href="http://www.writespirit.net/authors/sri_aurobindo/">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.