In today's Internet Marketing Newsletter...
Are You Using These
9 Crucial SEO Strategies?
Getting website traffic from search engines like
google and yahoo needs to be part of your Internet marketing
plan, mainly for 3
reasons:
1. It is high quality traffic (your
visitors searched using your best keywords!)
2. With good ranking you can get a lot of this traffic, passively
3. It's free!
I've received literally millions of visitors
from search engines over the years. Today I'll show you how to
start your own flow of search engine traffic.
But first, here's a
discount offer from the place where I now host most of my sites,
including all my WordPress blogs -- Hostgator...
If
you want your website to be ranked well at Google, Yahoo, and
Bing, you need to know a little about SEO.
SEO stands for search engine
optimization. It consists of a handful of strategies to help
your web pages rank better in the search engine results pages (serps) for a
particular search word or phrase.
SEO can be a complicated subject, which is why there are so many
freelance consultants and marketing companies offering SEO
services. Some of them are quite expensive, charging thousands
of dollars to get a site ranked in the top ten for your particular niche keywords.
However, if you are running on a
tight budget and can't afford to hire a professional, you can do SEO yourself.
Just follow the nine seo strategies below. Most of it is
fairly simple, it just takes time.
(When building new sites, I like
to do everything myself except steps seven and eight below, which
I like to outsource.)
Here are the top SEO strategies
that you should be using at all your websites and blogs.
1.
Choose your keywords wisely.
When you are planning your
website's content, you should do some research about which
keywords to use. Keywords are the search terms that people use
to find websites in search engines. Think carefully about your
target audience and consider what they might type into a search
engine when they are looking for websites like yours.
You can use tools like the Google
AdWords Keyword Tool to help you with your research. When you
are starting out, aim to have a list of five keyword phrases
that you will optimize your website for. Once you are ranking
well for these five, you can add more keywords to the list.
When using the Google Keyword
tool, use the "exact match" option so you know how many people
are searching for the exact terms you're researching. The best
keyword phrases to optimize for are keyword phrases with 2000 -
4000 monthly searches.
Those keywords usually have just enough searches to be
profitable, but not so many that the competition is too stiff to
outrank.
2.
Use your keywords in the title tags of your web pages.
A web page's title tag is one of
the most important factors for how that page will rank in the
search engines. Each page at your site should use a title tag
that matches the search term you're trying to get the page
ranked for. This is especially important at your main page. The
title tag should also describe the content of the page in a
concise and accurate manner. This helps the search engines decide how relevant the page is to a particular search term. The
more relevant a page is, the higher it will rank in the results
for that search term.
3.
Use your keywords in your domain name.
I've done a lot of research on
this and even though not everyone agrees, I have found clear
evidence that websites with exact match domains get top ranking
easier than non-keyword domain sites. In other words, once you
know your best keyword phrase for your niche, see if you can get
the domain name that matches that phrase exactly. Go for .com then .net, then .org.
If none of them are available, use a hyphen (-) between your
best keywords.
4.
Use your keywords in the HTML heading tags.
Heading tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3,
etc.) give the search engines more info about how relevant the
web page is to certain search terms. Make sure to use heading
tags containing your keywords at each page of your site. As a
bare minimum, every web page should have one H1 tag that
includes the same keywords that are in your title tag.
More tips after this sponsor message...
5. Check
the keyword density in your website text.
The number of times your keywords appear in the text at
your web page or blog helps search engines match the content to
the appropriate search terms. This is known as keyword density.
How often keywords should be used is often debated among SEO
experts. Some believe that stuffing a page with keywords is
beneficial to search engine rankings, while others think that
'keyword stuffing' is viewed as a form of spam by the search
engines. As a general rule, for a web page that has about
400-600 words of body content, use the main keyword once in the
first paragraph, once in second paragraph, once in the last
paragraph, and once somewhere in between.
6. Setup
your website's internal linking structure properly.
When you are planning your website or blog, make sure you
have at least one text link at every page, that links to your
main URL. The text link should contain your best keyword or
keyword phrase. As your site grows in size, so will the number
of web pages that point to your main page, increasing the
popularity for that page based on your best keywords. Also, when
adding blog posts at your blog, be sure to hyperlink to other
posts at your blog when appropriate. (Each time you do this, be
sure to use the keywords you're working at getting ranked!)
7.
Grow the number of incoming links from a wide variety
of external sites.
Of all the factors in SEO, one of the most important is the
number of web pages that link to the target page you are trying
to get ranked well. In other words, if site A and site B are
virtually identical, site A will outrank site B if there are
more web pages linking to site A.
Other factors that help are having
a variety of links and multiple links from high PR sites. (PR
stands for page rank, a weighted value google gives to pages
based on their authority.) If site A has links from a wide
variety of places such as social bookmarking sites like
stumbleupon and digg, niche blogs,
web 2.0 sites like squidoo and hubpages, article directories,
etc., it will outrank site B with the same
number of links all from one source.
Of course getting lots of links to a site can be time
consuming. That's why you may want to outsource this task. You
can do so at odesk.com, guru.com, elance.com and many other
places. Just be sure to hire link builders with a good track
record and lots of positive feedback. Also be sure to instruct
them properly and let them know you need links from a wide
variety of sources, and have them apply strategies 8 and 9
below.
8. Grow the
number of incoming links from external sites slowly and
consistently.
Don't go too fast with your link building campaign. Getting a
few dozen links a week or even 10 a day is OK, but if google
sees 1000 new incoming links to your site the next time they
update their database, you'll likely move down the serps,
not up.
9.
Use your keywords in as many incoming links as possible.
While you don't want all the links to your site to use the
same keyword or keyword phrase, you do want to focus on using
your best keyword or keyword phrase for most of your links.
Remember, SEO is all about proper site setup and link building. If
the top ranked web page at google for your best search term has say, 200
incoming links, you can outrank that page when you get 201,
provided you have all or most of the other strategies
explained today in place as well.
In closing...
If you use all of those strategies shared in today's gazette,
you will improve your ranking in the search engines. Depending
on the niche you're in, you could go right to the top of the serps
within a matter of months!
See ya in a few weeks...
Jim Daniels
P.S. If
you want a more help with SEO and setting up a successful info-product
business online,
this free package of mine will help.
Whether you want to completely phase out your day job like I
did, or you just want to supplement your household income, you
have to start somewhere!
Why not grab that free package and get started today...
P.P.S.
Here's a
discount offer to help you get started. It's from the place where I now host most of my sites,
including all my WordPress blogs -- Hostgator...
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