By Dan Fletcher

One of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website is through the search engines. And how much traffic you get will be based on how high you appear in the search engine rankings. So it is important to spend some of your marketing time trying to improve your search engine rankings. There are many ways to do this, but the two main ways are changing the text on your website, and increasing the links to your website. You also need to look at the actual links on your website- make sure you link to your important pages, and use good anchor text (which is the text that your link appears as, eg a link to bluewidgets.com might appear as "blue widgets", so "blue widgets is the anchor text"). A great way to optimize your internal links is to use a "search cloud".

A search cloud appears on your website (often on the side), and is a large list of words. Each word is a link, and they are all different sizes. Each word is something that someone searched for when they came to your website. If a lot of people search for a certain word, then that word will appear bigger in the cloud.

Search clouds help with search engine rankings. One of the on-page factors that search engines use is your internal links- these are used to see what YOU think your site is about. A search cloud helps with this, because it gives you internal links for phrases that you are already ranking well for- and the extra internal links will hopefully help you to rank even higher.

For example, imagine you sell widgets, and someone finds your page when they search for "buy widgets". When they click the link to your site, the phrase "buy widgets" will automatically be added to the search cloud with a link to the relevant page. Now you have an extra internal link for "buy widgets", and you are more likely to rank higher for it.

That's not the only reason to have a search cloud though! Another great benefit is that they encourage people to explore your site. When people see a search cloud, they can't help but glance through the list. Because of the wide variety of search terms, it is quite likely they will find something that interests them, and click the link. This means you will have lower bounce rates, as well as higher average page views per visitor. This will correspond to more page views- which will lead to more people buying your products, or making more money from your advertising.

A search cloud can normally be set up quite easily- particularly if you have a PHP based website. Most forums, script sites, and blogs are written in PHP, so a search cloud can usually be added with a small change to your template. If you have a normal HTML site it's still possible to add a search cloud- you may just need to do a bit more setup. If you're interested in trying a search cloud on your website, checkout the "Simple Search Cloud", available as a free script from: https://www.buymyscripts.net/Free_Scripts.html

Trying to find a good script to get you started? Try Dan Fletcher's scripting website, for all your scripting needs. There is a huge variety of easy-to-use scripts available, including cheat-code websites, hotscript clones, membership website scripts, and more: https://www.buymyscripts.net

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