List Building: Who Cares About SEO?	Visited: 727 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Tellman Knudson November 08, 2007

Do the words "search engine optimization" put a cold chill into the center of your heart? Does it seem too complicated? Do you even know what SEO means? Well, there's no doubt that it will bring lots of traffic to any website, which will in turn, intensify your list building efforts. However, to do it on a large scale, it takes very specialized knowledge. Can you do it? Should you do it? My answer is yes. There are some very simple techniques that can make your list building efforts go through the roof.

Remember to be list building on every page you can. Put an opt-in box on your website's homepage. Also put an opt-in box into your blog template, and into your profile at MySpace or wherever. If you haven't done these things, do them now! They're extremely important to list building.

To help people find your site, which increases your list building potential, you also want to know a few specific keywords that apply to your niche. My suggestion is to sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and list as many words as you can imagine that surround your niche.

Let's say you're selling jewelry online. You'll come up with words like pearls, gemstones, diamonds, earrings, rings, and so on. Then, hop over to http://inventory.overture.com and see how many people searched on each term in the previous month. Then, disregard the words with the highest number of searches because it will be too hard to rank in the search engine results for those. They're just uber-competitive. Also disregard any terms with 3,000 searches or less. Nobody's looking for them. They won't help you.

Then, from the words that are remaining, choose three to five and those will be the words you want to rank for. Use them in every blog post you make, but not all at once. Use the first word in a post, then the second, and so on. You'll need to use them at a keyword density of around 2%. That means, if you write 500 words, about 10 of them should be your keyword. It's not that easy, and it's very difficult to get 2% for all of them in one post. It will look and "sound" funny to the reader's ear. Plus, search engine spiders will think you're trying to spam them. Not good.

We're list building; really we are. Just hang on a second...

When you've finished your post, and you're sure your keyword density is around that 2% mark, go to your post and make the one of the keywords you used bold or italic. Also link to your website with one of the keywords you used, and make the hyperlink to your list building page. After making several posts in your blog, you should start to see your site rise in the rankings, and you'll be getting more people on your list. Don't expect immediate results because SEO takes a while to kick in. Just keep posting and using your keywords, and you should see some results.

You can do the same thing with your website and your blog at MySpace or wherever you hang out and be improving your list building efforts, too. You don't have to be an SEO genius to use these tricks, and you'll be amazed at the results. So, go sit down and start listing all the keywords you can imagine. Watch them work for you.