Search Engine Optimization
SEO – Search Engine Optimization Strategy is one of the most critical components of building an online business. Through search engine optimization, you can get massive amounts of very high-quality, targeted traffic for free. Yet so many people just ignore this fundamental task.
Why is SEO so important? Look at it this way. Let’s say you had a shop selling blue widgets. If you had your choice 
between someone who arrived at your site randomly and one who searched for “buy blue widgets” in a search engine, which would you choose? Obviously, you would prefer the visitor who is already apparently interested in buying what you are selling.
That is what search engine traffic is. They search for exactly what they are looking for. As long as your site ranks well for something you can actually provide, visitors are usually going to be well-targeted.
Since search engine traffic is generally well-targeted traffic, it’s extremely important to focus at least a good part of your marketing on SEO. Attracting search engine traffic is never a waste of time.
In this report, I’m going to give you some simple techniques you can use to get your sites to the top of the search engine results so you can get more quality traffic.
On-Page SEO
For years, the only type of search engine optimization was on-page SEO. This involved using certain techniques on your own pages to optimize them for the search engines.
Google changed all of that. Now on-page SEO isn’t enough. You also have to use off-page factors in addition to on-page. But on-page SEO is still very important. Without it, off-page factors can’t do their jobs as effectively.
On-Page factors include:
- Keywords
- Title tag
- Heading tags
- Page content
- Image alt tags
Keywords
Before you think about SEO – either on-page or off-page – you must think about keywords. All SEO revolves around keywords. It doesn’t matter how well you do with your optimization; if you aren’t using the right keywords, you’ve failed. You probably have no chance of ranking well for good keywords and getting a decent amount of traffic.
A keyword is a word or phrase that is used to search for something in a search engine. If someone wants to buy a blue widget, they may enter “buy blue widgets” into a search engine. “Buy blue widgets” is a keyword.
Search engines are getting better and better at extrapolating topics without specific keywords, but most of them do still depend pretty heavily on keywords. So, before you start working on your SEO, you need to do some keyword research to find keywords that have a significant amount of traffic, but that also have little competition.
http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Above you will see a link to Google’s own keyword tool. This is free to use, and you don’t need an AdWords account. You can enter a seed keyword or phrase into this box and you will get a number of related keywords you can use for your SEO. You’ll even get the estimated number of searches performed for each keyword in Google every month!
Remember, you need to find keywords with a healthy number of searches, but you should also check competition. The more results you find when you enter the keyword into Google, the harder it will likely be to rank. So keep this in mind when you are researching keywords.
Title Tag
The title tag is in the <head> section of an HTML document. This is one of the most important parts of the entire page. Most search engines assign a tremendous amount of weight to the words found in the title tag. After all, most people give the page a title that corresponds to the topic of the page.
When you select your title, be sure to use the keyword phrase that most correctly describes the content of the page. If your page is selling blue widgets, you might want to use a title such as:
“Buy Blue Widgets – The Top Source for Blue Widgets”
You don’t want to use a single keyword phrase alone with no other words in your title, as this can get you hit with an over-optimization penalty and actually hurt your chances to rank.
Heading Tags
Some people claim heading tags don’t work as well, anymore. I find that’s not true. Heading tags do still help with SEO if they are used correctly. Just remember that using a single keyword phrase alone in an H1 tag can hurt you in the same way that using a keyword phrase alone in your title tag can. Use heading tags sparingly and carefully, and they can be extremely beneficial.
Page Content
Obviously, the content on your page should contain your keywords. But be careful! If you repeat your keywords too often, even accidentally, you risk receiving a penalty.
Try to write naturally. Natural writing is what people want to see, and it is also what search engines want to see. Just include your main keyword phrase at least once or twice, and that should be plenty.
Alt Tags
Your images should also contain keywords in their alt tags, but again, don’t overdo it. Use no more than 10 words, describe the picture and use your keyword phrase in the description if possible. Do NOT stuff keywords into this tag!
Off-Page SEO & Backlinks
Off-page SEO involves anything that isn’t on your own web page. You usually cannot control the content of off-page factors, but sometimes you can. In this section, I’m going to give you a few tips you can use to make off-page SEO a little easier.
As I mentioned before, on-page SEO used to be the only type of SEO necessary. Then Google came along and changed the game completely. Instead of using the content of a web page to calculate position, it also started looking at how many pages were linking to a particular page as a way to gauge the quality of that page.
They assumed that quality pages would have a lot of links pointing to them, and low quality pages would have few or none at all. This seemed reasonable enough, but there were millions of pages out there that had quality, unique content, but were new or unable to be found amongst their competition. Enter backlinks.
Backlinks are links that point to a particular web page. They can be for other pages on the same website, or from other websites. They can be given altruistically by someone wanting to recommend the site, or commercially by the site’s owner, or a site owner who has been paid to link there.
Initially, backlinks were supposed to work like “votes”. Each backlink was considered a “vote” by another website that said the page being linked to was a good page. Of course, smart webmasters soon learned that they could create their own backlinks. In fact, most people HAD to, because it’s very, very difficult to get backlinks to a new page on an unfamiliar website!
Now, let’s look at some ways to get backlinks to your own website and pages.
Anchor Text
Before we look at ways to get backlinks, we need to examine one quick subject – anchor text. Anchor text is the actual text used to link to a page. The most common anchor text is “click here”, but that is not good for search engine optimization! It’s extremely important to get backlinks to your pages that actually contain the keywords you’re trying to rank for!
If you want to rank for “buy blue widgets”, you would want to use this code:
<a href=http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com/blue-widgets>Buy Blue Widgets</a>
This would look like this:
Buy Blue Widgets
The text “Buy Blue Widgets” is the anchor text. You should make sure at least 50% of your backlinks contain your main keyword phrase, but NOT 100%! If ALL of your backlinks are exactly the same, it looks unnatural and could hurt your rankings more than help.
Article Marketing
Article marketing is one of the best ways to get links back to your pages. You simply choose a keyword, write an article based on that topic, and submit the article to various article directories with a link back to your site in the resource box.
Not only can you get backlinks from articles you submit, but you can also get direct traffic, as well. Sometimes your articles will outrank your own website, at least for a while. But that’s okay, because you’ll get traffic from the people who read your articles, too.
Forum Marketing
Forums are great places to get backlinks. Many forums don’t allow links in signatures, but some do. If you can find a forum in your niche that allows links in signatures, put a link to your site in your signature using anchor text, then just post on the forum like everyone else.
Don’t just post to get your signature seen. You’ll want to be polite and friendly at all times, and post fairly lengthy, knowledgeable posts. Remember, you’re representing your “brand”, so be sure you do it justice.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is something that many people seem to fear. They think creating videos is too difficult or technical, or that videos need live actors or voiceovers. That’s simply not true. For video marketing purposes, you don’t have to appear on camera, and you don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to.
Videos can be created easily with Microsoft PowerPoint, or through the use of online tools like Animoto. These videos can then be posted to video sharing sites like YouTube.com and MetaCafe.com.
When you post your videos, be sure to put a link to your site in the description if links are allowed. This will give you a valuable backlink that will help boost your rankings.
Social Content Sites
Sites like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com allow you to create simple pages with content easily. They work a bit like article marketing, but you have more control over what you do with your links and your writing.
You can easily create pages on these sites and link back to your own pages. This will give you valuable backlinks, as well as direct traffic. You can also place affiliate links directly on these sites for more cash!
Additional SEO Tips
To make the most of the search engine traffic you receive, I highly recommend using a squeeze page or opt-in form to gather email addresses. Search engine traffic is extremely valuable and precious, and you don’t want to lose it when you get it.
Gather email addresses and you can market to those people again and again for many years to come. Otherwise, they may leave your site and never return, potentially never making you any money.
Don’t forget to include pages for a privacy policy, terms, disclaimer and contact. Google loves to see these pages on websites, and they may rank higher simply because they contain these pages.
Finally, remember to keep things as natural as possible. Sometimes, doing too much and having “perfect” SEO can actually hurt your rankings. Don’t stuff keywords into your pages, don’t use the same anchor text every time, and don’t gather too many backlinks too quickly. This will appear unnatural and could hurt your site in the long run. Do things as naturally as possible, and you will soon find your pages soaring to the top of the search engines!
Related articles
- SEO 101 Resources: Beginner’s Guides and Tutorials (searchenginejournal.com)
- Back to Basics – SEO 101 (searchenginewatch.com)
