Whether it is a small-to-medium business, or an individual internet marketer there are too many instances of beautiful websites that are collected dust and getting no traffic.
In fact, the majority of websites get no meaningful daily website traffic and my definition of meaningful is simple - that there is enough traffic to make the website a profitable venture.
Internet techies talk about search engine optimization and click through rates and other technical jargon. This only confuses the issue even further for most small business owners because all they want is more traffic from new prospects who want to buy their products or services.
They could care less about the technical aspects of SEO that the so called experts get caught up with, these business owners just want results from higher search engine placement.
I try to make the process of getting higher search engine placement simpler and easier to understand. While there are definitely some technical aspects to what I do, in my opinion SEO is more about a marketing “opportunity†instead of a technical “issueâ€.
Let’s make this simple to understand. An integral part of the SEO process is keyword research and it provides the foundation of the rest of the SEO implementation. Understanding which keywords to select is a learned skill that only comes from numerous SEO projects.
SEO keyword research is part technical, part marketing and part intuition. But a major part of the selection process is finding keywords that describe your business, the industry you serve and the products / services that you provide and these are the keyword phrases that become a key part of your online and offline marketing strategy.
Higher search engine placement comes from understanding which methods of SEO generate the best results and then following the repetitive process as follows:
Market Research
We start every project with a research of competitors in your industry to assess their online positions. This research provides us with a glimpse of the difficulty or ease that getting top rankings will be, and will also provide some early insight into potential keywords to target.
Keyword Research
There are multiple phases to keyword research:
a) seed keyword exploration
b) long tail keyword digging and
c) ongoing maintenance
The fact is simple - keyword research is the foundation of everything else that is done with the SEO project. It is very important that this part of the project is done correctly, and then just as important to continue keyword research on an ongoing basis to stay aligned with current search trends.
Content Creation
It has been said many times but, to get higher search engine placement rankings, content is king. There is on-page content and there is off-page content and they are both very important for their own respective reasons. The on page content is to keep a steady stream of fresh, new content on your website so the search engines keep coming back. And the reason of off page content is …
Backlinks
The off page content is used in various places - article directories, web 2.0 properties, social bookmarking sites, web directories, etc. - for building links back to your website using the targeted keywords as the anchor text for the link that points back to the page you want ranked.
How To Get Backlinks for Better Search Engine Placement
How to get backlinks is one of the most perplexing questions for most internet marketers and the industry is rife with false information and false claims about the best method. Most of these methods involve spamming, or other methods that are simply outdated and do not work effectively.
For example, there are numerous tools available that allow automated blog comment posting as a preferred method to build high quality backlinks.
But there are a couple of problems with this method because it is basically nothing more than spamming other blogs’ comments with a bunch of worthless information.
Most of these comments get caught in the blog spam blocker and never get approved anyway, so it is a waste of time and effort.
In addition to the content being worthless and never making it into the actual comment posts, there are indications that the search engines are now devaluing blog comments as legitimate backlinks because they are now viewed as worthless data.
And then there are the other usual suspects of building backlinks:
Forum Posts - much like blog posts, these are not high quality backlinks and do not offer a lot of value
Article Marketing - these are still viewed as very good quality but have been diluted somewhat because of the article spinning and ensuing spammy nature it provides
Social Bookmarking - this is a very strong, high quality link building method and typical provides a lot of click through traffic
Website Directory Listings - this is arguably the original method of building back links and while still effective, they are not as high quality as they once were because of automated submission tools
Guest Blogging - this is a very effective method SEO link building method because the links are typically “in line links†meaning that the links come from the main body of the text, instead of in the comment box, or in the footers, or from a ‘links’ page, etc.
I advocate an “all of the above†mentality that you should try to build links at every opportunity and at every location that is possible. With link building it is important to remember that quality and quantity both count.