Wouldn't it be pointless to open a pizza shop which nobody knows about? You know your pizzas are good, the ambiance is great, and people will love it when they visit your place; but informing people of its existence is a must. In today's cut throat competition, advertising is the key to success for any business. Now think about your online business/website; if your site doesn't get any traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN there is very little chance that people would come to know of its existence.
This is where Search Engine Optimization (
SEO) techniques come in. They will help you to get more people to your website through search engine hits. The best thing about
SEO is that you don't need to be a professional to do it. What you do need is hard work, patience and the willingness to learn. Let me begin by telling you why you should bother about putting in your time to learn
SEO.
ADVANTAGES OF
SEO
* Its FREE unlike traditional advertising media like TV, newspaper etc
* It helps you drive more traffic to your website more traffic to your website
* Unlike paid media, organic traffic (traffic through search engines) consists of targeted customers, which are more likely to buy your product or revisit your website
* It helps you to advertise your website globally
SEO is still in its early days so many people don't use these techniques. So, if you do apply them it will be a significant boost
I think you would agree that the above advantages are substantial, more so, because you can do those all by yourself with the help of some free tools plus technical know-how. I will come to those later in my post, but let me cover some basics about
SEO first.
WHAT DOES
SEO MEAN?
Search engines help people to navigate the internet. Google ranks pages based primarily on the following criteria:
* Density of the keyword (search by the user) on the webpage
* Quality and quantity of backlinks to that webpage from other websites. Quality of backlinks is the more important point
SEO is a set of techniques which help you to optimize your website for the search engines. Optimizing your website means that for certain keywords (which you choose), the website will rank high, and will possibly turn up on the first page of Google (I will use this as the base search engine).
FREE
SEO TOOLS!
There are plenty of tools out there which are very useful for
SEO. Here is a brief roundup of the top tools:
Objective 1: to choose the appropriate keywords to target for
SEO
When you are trying to optimize your website for search engines, it is critical that you know which keywords you are going to target. This tool allows you to find the number of Google searches for the keywords. You should remember a couple of things:
* A keyword which has millions of strikes per day/month will probably have the big guns trying to fight for the first spot. So you should try and stay away from such words
* A keyword which has a few hundred hits per month is of no use. The traffic is always shared by sites which turn up on the first page of Google, so even if you turn up on first page for this, it wont help you
* It is always better to choose 20 keywords with 500 hits each instead of 1 keyword with 10000 hits. But it is not wise to choose so many keywords, that you won't be able to incorporate them into your website. You need to optimize the number of keywords you want to target
* So in a nutshell, after you find a suitable keyword, go and do a Google search for the word and see what kind of sites are targeting that keyword. Find your niche keywords, and smaller competitors to begin with
Methodology:
As all Google applications generally are, the interface is very intuitive and simple to use. So let me quickly show you how to use it. All the steps and details are shown in the thumbnail below to give you a complete picture.
Objective 2: To compare search volumes based on keywords, locations and time
Google Insights is a relatively advanced tool which can help you analyze the search trends to the fullest. It basically helps you to do a competitive intelligence test and identify how keywords/businesses are doing compared to each other.
Methodology:
Let's take an example of Yahoo vs. Microsoft Vs Google, and learn how to use the tool along with the example. Again, I will be able to explain it to you much faster through pictures, and it will be a lot more interesting for you. The numbers in the graphs are nothing but scaled and normalized numbers. Suppose, in Jan 2008 'Google' was searched the most ever in its lifecycle, then it is assigned 100. Then, the number 79 for Jan 2009 means that 'Google' (keyword) is searched only 79% of the times as it was searched at its peak (Jan 2008).
As it is easily seen from the high level search I did above, that this is an awesome
SEO tool. You can use it to compare keywords you want to use, see how you are performing against competition, and much more. Play around with this tool and analyze and plan your business growth.
There are so many tools that it would be impossible to even start mentioning them, but the above should be enough to get you started. Here, you can find a checklist of some good
SEO tools.
About the Author
Rick Hanson has been involved in the business leads industry and targeted traffic industry for 8 years. To discover more jealously-guarded secrets of making tons of dollars or more every year through building your list or sending quality visitors to your website, visit Real Traffic Source
How to Increase Web Traffic through Search Engines
How to Increase Web Traffic through Search Engines
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