If marketing is needed for an off-line company to survive, it is critical and essential for an online company to survive. Accidental traffic does not occur online. Unless you deliberately market to your potential customers, you will not receive any web traffic whatsover. And without traffic, you will not generate sales.
You have three options for generating internet traffic:
If you are not prepared to perform one of the three above options, then you might as well forget about making money online. It isn't going to happen. If you are interested in trying to perform your own SEO, this page is for you.
Follow the guidelines below and you will see a steady increase in traffic to your website. Be warned: this takes time, work, and discipline. The learning curve is about 9 months of full time internet-marketing before you will grasp how things work online. There is no "magic bullet" that will bring you instant web-traffic. Good luck
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site more "search engine friendly" with the purpose of achieving higher rankings in the search engine results page. SEO also includes what is termed as "off-site" SEO which mostly refers to a link-building program.
I'm an expert at link-building or "off site" SEO. I have developed my own methods that will generate free, targeted search engine traffic for your site. To learn more about the services I offer, visit services.
What is the process of SEO? The short version is as follows:
Determine your keywords. You need to establish the keywords you want for your website before you can do any kind of SEO. For example: if you own a website about car wax, you might want to target the following keywords: "best car wax", "buy car wax", "car wax tips".
How do you find good keywords? You need to know your target audience, and then you need to research what types of keywords are already being searched on the internet. Once you find the keywords you want, you need to analyze your competition and determine whether or not it is worth your time to tackle each keyword. (There is a more thorough approach to finding keywords. Please scroll to the bottom of this page to learn about Advanced Keyword Analysis).
Analzye your keywords. How many websites are competing for the keywords you want? What is the depth of their hold on those keyword terms? What is the quality level of the top ten websites? Can you take that keyword in a few months, or will it require a year's worth of link-building? Always remember: your competitiors are adding backlinks every month, so if you are adding 50 backlinks per month, and they are adding 50 backlinks per month, you will never rank higher than them!
Perform "on-site" SEO. This is fairly simple: one <H1> tag with the exact keywords you want at the top of the page. Bold the exact keyword-phrase no more than once on each page of your site. Maintain a 2-3% keyword density on each page.
If you really want to own a specific keyword, then you should change the title of your landing page to include the exact keyword-phrase inside of it. If you want additional keywords, use them in a <H2> tag. Also, you should avoid using tables and try to use a cascading style sheet for laying out your pages. CSS sheets are not nearly as important as people make them out to be, but they help.
Install Google Analytics. This is a free tool from Google. You will need to setup an account and install their code within your pages. This code will not be visible to those who visit your site. However, whenever someone views one of your web pages, Google keeps track of where they came from & how long they stayed on your site. This information is critical to tracking the success of your SEO program. You should get a full week's worth of data before you begin to establish backlinks to your site. I have found the Google data to be about 75% (or less) accurate. For a free service, it works great. If you want a more accurate analysis of visitors, you are going to have to purchase software or a tracking service, and those can get very expensive.
Develop a gameplan. Now that you have an estimate of the number of back links you need, go get them! You will want to use the following forms of back link generation for SEO: articles, social bookmarking, directories, reciprocal links, and blogging (although forums are great for traffic generation, search engines do not put much weight on them for the SERP).
What is a backlink? What is anchor text? Backlinks are the determining factor for Search Engine Ranking. Each backlink that you get for your website is considered a "vote". Each backlink for your website that contains anchor text is considered a vote for your website for that exact keyword or phrase.
Here is an example of a backlink that links to Google: http://www.google.com Here is an example of a backlink with specific anchor text: Search Engine.
The destination URL is the same for both of the above links: when you click on either of them they take you to Google. Although the first link is still a backlink, the second link contains what is called "anchor text". This anchor text establishes "one vote" for Google under the exact phrase "Search Engine".
Here is how the HTML coding looks for a general backlink:
<a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>.
Here is how the HTML coding looks for a backlink with specific anchor text:
<a href="http://www.google.com">Search Engine</a>.
The more anchor links you can provide under a specific phrase, the higher your page will rank in the search engines for that exact phrase. This (obviously) also depends on how much competition exists for the keyword. Advanced Keyword Analysis This type of analysis may not be necessary for some types of websites. However, it is much more thorough and can save you months of wasted SEO efforts.
"On the web, traffic is everything." That sentence is almost true. There is one critical word missing: "on the web, targeted traffic is everything".
10,000 visitors a day to your website sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Well, what if you owned a flower-shop website and every one of those 10,000 visitors was in desparate need of a new pair of Snowboard bindings? Would that do you any good? Nope.
I'd rather have 50 targeted visitors a day to my website than an audience of 10,000 random, untargeted visitors. The trick is not only finding the keywords that your targeted audience is using for their searches, but you must find the keywords that convert to sales.
The quickest and most efficient method for finding keywords that convert is setting up a Google Adwords campaign. You must buy traffic, and you must setup Google's conversion-tracking on your conversion pages.
Let's say you have 5 keywords you want to use for your site. Before you begin the long, slow process of SEO, setup an Adwords campaign with each of those keywords. Make sure you have the conversion-tracking tool in place and working! Write some good ad copy and have at least two types of ads for each keyword.
After everything is setup and live, let the traffic/conversion dictate which keywords you develop your SEO campaign around. A minimum of 100 clicks would give you a fairly accurate conversion percentage. Let's say you have 100 clicks from the keyword "black leather handbag", and those clicks generated 2 sales at your website. You now know that you should get 2 sales for every 100 visitors that find your site under a particular search phrase. Easy huh? With that data in mind, you can move forward with your SEO campaign and tackle keywords that you already know will convert. If you choose this form of Keyword Analysis, I would recommend you start with a minimum of 5 keywords and get at least 200 clicks per keyword for your data.