If you have an online business then you know how important traffic is to you. Without people viewing your site, how can you hope to find buyers for your products? One way to get them to come running is through search engine optimization.
What is SEO?
This is the abbreviation for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of using keywords to bring targeted traffic to you. Ideally, when people enter their search keywords into any of the most popular search engines, your website content, videos and audio media should pop up in the first page of search results. That is what everyone wants to achieve. The better the search engine rankings the more likely you are to get buyers who are ready to spend their money on what you have to offer.
How to Use It
Now, there are courses that teach search engine optimization. There are also SEO firms that will gladly take your money in exchange for their help in outfitting your website for the traffic that you want. They can promise front page Google and Yahoo rankings within web searches. But, all of this costs money and it’s not pennies we’re talking about here.
It may take you longer, but you can learn how to use SEO yourself. As a student of Internet marketing, you have to be willing to do the legwork required to gain the knowledge you seek. It sounds a little Zen but it works.
1. Know how to use the resources available to you. If you don’t have any keywords in mind, you can use free online keyword tools to help you discover the viability of keywords in your niche. They will also rank them for you. Keep a spreadsheet of all the words you use so you can track how they work at increasing your visitors, sales and search engine rankings. Here are three keyword tools you can start with:
2. Pick a keyword or two and use it on your website. Website optimization is a bit trickier than optimizing content (we’ll get to that later). For your website, these keywords can appear in web page headlines, picture tags, taglines, anchor text (the words that hide a hyperlink within the text of an article) and other places. When your website is registered with search engines, the bots and spiders crawl each page. You want them to find your keywords and rank accordingly.
3. Use the keywords in your content displayed on your website. Keyword density is the number of times that a certain keyword appears in a piece of content of a certain size. Optimal keyword usage is between 1% and 3%. Going over that could be considered “stuffing” and get you reprimanded.
Search engine optimization is trial and error. Others can do it for you for a price. But, if you are dedicated and want to increase your skill set, you can learn to use it for yourself and drive traffic to your website and increase sales.
I completely agree that SEO is a great way to promote your site or brand. It’s one of the most important Internet marketing methods out there.
Learning how to use SEO on your own can be very time consuming if you don’t have previous experience, not to mention confusing! While there are great free tools out there, but you need to know how to use them.
Remember that time is money, so when you have everything you need in one place, you’re saving!!