SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the name for numerous techniques to increase Internet traffic. There are numerous techniques to achieving this, some tend to be easier than others. In a few words, SEO increases your presence on search engines which increases your traffic numbers. The goal for all SEO is to get your website to appear as number one for searches.
A fantastic first step is to ensure your blog is already optimized correctly. Make sure to use the most appropriate French meta keywords and descriptions so that search engines can spider your website correctly. Once this is done you will not have to look at it again. If your blog is about food, write a description, a title and some keywords targeting your subject area. This is also the information which is shown in search engine results.
Also, it is very important to write good, well structured and unique content, so get a French person to read it. Copy and pasting your content from different sources will mean you get penalized by search engines. Search engines have become highly intelligent. Their aim is to offer the best content to users so duplicate content is not in their interest. Thus, if you merely plagiarize content you will be penalized and marked down in the search rankings.
Regardless of language you are optimising for, once you have optimized your website correctly and written good, original content, the next stage is to build links. Search engines determine how good your site is by how many inbound links you have. If your website has more links than another one, search engines will rank your website higher. If you write good content that is keyword rich then this will happen naturally but it can take a while. To speed it up you may want to try some of the following techniques.
Firstly, write original content and submit it to French article directories. These can sometimes be tricky to get accepted by because they want good, original content but for every article you write and submit to you can get two or more links back to your website from a high ranking website. Search engines really like this. You may see SEO as a game – always trying to get quality links from good sources.
Secondly, you are also able to manually build links to your blog by commenting on blogs. Many blog owners will allow you to link back to your blog with a dofollow link. Dofollow is the colloquial name given to links that search engines will take notice of, compared to nofollow links. Nofollow was invented because people used to pay for links to their site or spam lots of links. Search engines will ignore nofollow links and you will not get any SEO benefit. Spend some time finding blogs that will allow you to link to your site? This will benefit the SEO of your site, increase your online presence and will allow you to network with your fellow bloggers within the blogosphere. The comments ought to be genuine and relevant to the posts. In most cases, writing something self-promotional (e.g.: “please take a look at my home page “) will not get accepted and you will have wasted time and effort. You should always be a productive commenter.
Furthermore, you can also use general and French (there are a few) book marking websites to bookmark to your site. Do not spam your website too much because the admins for the sites will most likely block your website. Similar to directories, you will get a good link from a good quality page. Well established websites are given greater weight by search engines. Effectively, you will get more SEO benefit from an established site than a new one. In other words, getting a link from a really popular online bookmark site is worth more compared to a link from a small, unheard of site.
One last tip is to submit your site to online French directories. They can be annoying to setup but you can get a good inbound link for your site if you manage it. Many of the online directories are well established and have high page rankings. However, submitting your site to a directory can get confusing because there are usually different options for submission. It is common for directories to offer different free and paid submission options. Generally they are: paid, free but with reciprocal links and free. Paying for links can be quite expensive but you will get fast tracked into the directory. Many of the higher ranked directories only offer paid for submissions. A free link may take months to be approved (as there is often a long waiting list for websites to be accepted). Unfortunately, reciprocal links negate the SEO benefit of the link because they are not one-way. You may find that they are useful for referral traffic but for french SEO they are not useful.
If you follow the above hints and tips then you should see an improvement in your search engine rankings. However you should also definitely be using services to monitor and report your SEO efforts and Internet traffic. This way you will be able to see what has the most benefit and what you can focus more on. Of course another option you could find some multilingual SEO consultants to do the work for you. What ever you choose its essential to take some action today.