You can have the best voice in the world, the best delivery, the best voice over equipment, but what if no one can find you? Are you depending on web traffic to supplement your voice over income? Web searches are important to us all. You can have the fanciest voice over website ever created, but its wasted money if your site doesn't show up on search engines.

It takes hard work to maintain a popular site; it also takes money to make money. BUT, it doesn't take a ton of dollars to generate website traffic for your site.

Some voice over talents get big hits on their sites and not every one of them is a Don LaFontaine or Joe Cipriano. A lot of the big hit voice talents are spending money on Google ads or banner ads, some of them even have an entire marketing plan implemented. If you have a ton of money and hire the right people this is definitely easier. This is, of course expensive and not necessarily the best way to go about it.

Then there are the other voice talents out there that get lots of traffic to their voice over websites by using SEO techniques. SEO, stands for search engine optimization. Do a Google search on SEO and 183 million sites pop-up. There is a complete industry out there dedicated to what you can do for little or no cost. Is SEO worth it? You bet, and if you have the money to spend go for it. Otherwise, let's get to work on some easy things you can do.

Here are some words and concepts you should know:
Title tags – These are the words that appear in the upper left of your browser. Make sure they are short, sweet and to the point and more importantly, keyword rich. When your site appears on a web search this is what is displayed. The closer this is to what people are searching for, the better your chances for being found.

Keywords – Keyword and keyword density should be top priorities. Keywords are the things people type into the various search engines to find relevant web pages. Take the time to figure-out the words you think people would use to find your page. Keyword density is making sure your page uses these particular words in its content.

Sitemaps – Sitemaps are not only a good idea to help people navigate your site, but it also tells the search engines which pages to index. The more search engine indexing, the better the chance your site will pop up on a search.

Content – Search engines LOVE content, the more the better. Make sure you update the content often. Search engines want to provide the most relevant pages for their users, that's why they give higher priority to sites that are active and informational. Maybe you are good at one area of voice over work or you have great technical knowledge. Blogs and podcasts are special favorites of search engines—start one today.

Links – Do whatever you can to get people to link to your site. The higher ranking a site has that links to you, the higher your rank becomes. Search engines feel that if other people are linking to your site your site must be important. Do whatever you can to build links and the closer on topic the referring site is to your keywords the more they are worth their weight in gold.

I barely scratched the surface on this topic and most of the value to you might be simply making you aware that SEO exists. A college course could be given on each one of the items, but the good news is there are countless resources on the web.

Look for my article on "off-site" voice over website optimization.