If you’ve already gone through the experience of starting your own website, you’re aware of the hollow feeling that sets in after your site goes live. You check your traffic monitor often, (too often) waiting for visitors to arrive. The Internet can feel like a cold and lonely place to the new webmaster! One way that you can increase your exposure and start bringing in hordes of visitors is by taking a few simple steps to optimize your website for search engine performance.

Search engine optimization, commonly called SEO, is a field that supports full-time professionals and consulting firms. There are countless ways to improve your site’s search ranking, some of them quite complex. The different SEO strategies open to you also cover a wide spectrum of ethical implications as defined by the search engines. Unethical SEO practices (“black hat SEO”) can get your search ranking penalized or your site removed entirely from a search engine’s index. You’ll want to stick with simple, ethical (“white hat”) SEO, especially when you’re first starting out.

The best way to start improving search engine performance is to identify keywords that you want to focus on. These should be brief, apt descriptions of your site’s subject matter. In the ideal case, someone who ran a search for your chosen keyword and arrived at your site would be entirely satisfied by it. You should limit yourself to just a handful of keywords, and they should be fairly specific. If you tried to optimize your site for the keyword “plumber,” for example, you’d be up against a ton of competition and your efforts would make little difference. With a keyword like “plumber in Muncie, Indiana,” your work will be much more effective.

Once you have a few keywords picked out, it’s time to start sprinkling them into your site. The written content that visitors see should definitely include your keywords, but you want them to fit rationally into the flow of the words. Restrain yourself against the temptation to use your keywords over and over, too. Search engines automatically measure the keyword density of a web page; a page which consists mainly of keywords will get flagged as spam. Don’t neglect the possibilities for using your keywords under the hood, either. HTML tags make great places to insert keywords – although here, too, you should keep keyword use restrained and applicable to the subject of the page.

Beyond the borders of your website, you can and should take steps to drum up attention. Don’t be shy! Participating in online forums and communities where your site would be of interest to the other members is a great way to build interest in it. It also has a positive SEO effect, because you will be laying down links pointing to your site from other parts of the Internet. Be bold about promoting your site, but not pushy. Don’t inject your links into conversations and forums where they are unrelated to the topic. Try to be a legitimate, contributing member of the communities in which you promote your site.

Hopefully, trying out the methods presented here will have a positive effect on the amount of traffic your site gets, and the Internet will start to feel a lot less lonely. These ideas are just the barest bones of search engine optimization. There is a lot more for you to learn in the realm of SEO if you like the results these initial strategies provide.