Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is a great way to get more traffic to your website through natural searches on MSN, google, and yahoo. I get a lot of traffic to my sites from the 3 major search engines. With a new site, however, you may not find google gives you much traffic for a while.

Your goal is to get your page listed on the first page of the search engines for the terms in your niche that people are searching for. However, for competitive terms, don't sweat it too much. Choose more, less competitive terms to focus on, though you can include competitive terms in your site as well. But they are much harder to rank well on. And, of course, building good rankings in the search engines does take time, but it can be done.

You can find big, thick books written on this topic. We don’t have that kind of time or space here, but we’ll try to give you an overview without overwhelming you. And there's some great courses on SEO which I'll go into later (I only recommend the one I use myself - and given that I now get over 20,000 unique visitors to my site ever month - and growing; and that I have broken into the top 30 for a keyword which returns 65,000,000 (without even really trying for that particular word) - I can vouch that this course works, like no other.)

How can Search Engine Optimization get you traffic?

The fantastic thing about the search engines, which gives them an advantage over traditional offline traffic generation methods, is that you can get highly targeted traffic from them. By selecting the keywords you build your site around, you get exactly the kind of audience you are aiming for with your product or service, or even information site.

For instance, if you go to google.com and type in “Dog Food for Poodles” – you’ll actually get those results. So, if you were looking to buy “Dog Food for Poodles”, you’d likely have your credit card out and be hot, hot, hot to spend lots of money on dog food for - you guessed it – your poodle.

THAT is the kind of visitor you want coming to your website. Not a poodle lover, but someone hot, hot, hot to find information or spend money on your niche.

If you have an information website, the same rule applies. Assuming you want information about “Training Miniature Poodles” just go to google and type in that term and you’ll find websites that will help you teach your unruly poodle some manners.

Stop and think about what your website is about. Actually, what each page of your website is about. You’ll want to set up each page of your website to be sure to let the search engines know exactly who to send you. 

Where do you start?

Since this is a very simple overview of Search Engine Optimization, we’ll just cover the basics. There are two factors that determine how much traffic the search engines will send you. One is the information you have on your own website - that is, the words on it, and your outbound links. Second is how many other websites are linking to your website. - And, very importantly - what type of websites are linking in. What subject are they? Are they a 'bad neighborhood'? These are the two areas you’ll want to work on in order to increase your search engine ranking for your niche.

Regarding the information on your website: Be sure to use the right keywords for your niche. If your page is about “Marathon Walking” then use the term “Marathon Walking” as your title and in the body of your article. There is a level at which this is very simple, but there are also subtleties involved to squeeze the highest ranking out of a page possible. These subtleties become more important for more competitive keywords, when all other factors are equal. This sort of thing is covered really thoroughly in that search engine optimization course I mentioned, the one that helped me get over 20,000 unique visitors to my site a month. You can check it out here.

Your offsite goals are just as easy. Work on getting other people to link to your website. You can do this by writing and submitting articles, posting comments on other people’s blogs, writing press releases or even posting on forums. More on this in the other traffic articles!

You don’t have an On Line business if you don’t have a top Search Engine Position. Use a Proven System that shows you Exactly What To Sell and Exactly How to get Buyers to your site.

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