If you’re reading this page then it’s likely you have an idea about what I mean by SEO but may have need of an SEO Guide. This page is directed at those new to this area so let’s just break down the terms, to fully understand what it means. The information might not be exciting but I used this very concept to start my new life in Internet marketing. I was able to give up my well paid consultancy job to work full time from my own home making a very good income. You can do the same, if you learn the basic concepts well and not get sidetracked by get rich schemes.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the practice of optimizing your web page, blog or whatever to ensure you get more traffic from the search engines. The art (or is it Science) of SEO is fundamental to this marketing technique.
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Let me give you a very brief overview of SEO first and then I’ll leave some links to further reading at the end of this post. Unless you’re very lucky and have a worldwide brand under your control you are going to rely heavily on the search engines to bring traffic to your web site.
So how do Search engines bring traffic – well simple, they process what you type into the search box and then display a list of web pages in response to that search.
If you typed in “Fishing in South Dakota” – you’d expect to see a list of web pages that contained information on “Fishing in South Dakota”, if you didn’t then you’d probably go else where.
Putting SEO Marketing into Action
When you perform SEO on a web page, you have to decide which phrase or search words you are targeting, which market you’re targeting if you like. This process is called keyword research. It’s probably best explained by some examples. Let’s pick an example, perhaps you have a small hotel near Yellowstone National Park and you’ve set up a web site to bring in customers. Great, but nobody ever does visit because you’re relying on people just finding your web site. You need to engage with the search engines to try and bring customers to your site.
So lets look at the first stage, keyword research – it simply means finding the best search queries that your web site will appear in. Let’s have a look at some possibilities here –
| Search Term | Daily Searches | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| yellowstone hotels | |||
| yellowstone park hotels | 6608 | ||
| yellowstone lodging | 2433 | ||
| west yellowstone hotels | 2323 | ||
| yellowstone hotel | 1989 | ||
| yellowstone map | 1627 | ||
| yellowstone lodge | 1088 | ||
| inn yellowstone | 1057 | ||
| yellowstone vacation | 891 | ||
| yellowstone camping | 730 | ||
| yellowstone park hotel | 595 | ||
| yellowstone reservations | 398 | ||
| yellowstone motel | 384 | ||
So we can see a list of example search queries and an estimate of how many times these are searched for every day. Of course some of those terms would be more appealing to our hotel owner, some would be more likely to bring in paying customers, other terms may be too general.
If the hotel was in the West of Yellowstone then the phrase
west yellowstone hotels 2323
This is why keyword research is so essential, and is the essence of SEO marketing especially if your web site is designed to make money and bring in customers.
There is more to keyword research like looking at combinations, the competition and other factors but this illustrates the point and hopefully the possibilities. If the owner of our West Yellowstone Hotel could bring in hundreds of people a day to his website who have typed in ‘west yellowstone hotels’ – I think we can all see the potential.
- Title Tags – The Title of your Web page must contain the keywords you are targeting. So in our example we must use the phrase – West Yellowstone Hotels somewhere in our Title tag.
- H1 Tag – This is a header tag which we use for headings in our web site – the search engines look for this as an indicator about the topic of the page. We must also use the phrase ‘West Yellowstone Hotels somewhere in a heading on our page.
- Keyword Density – You should make sure that the phrase ‘West Yellowstone Hotels is used occasionally in our web page. Don’t overdo it though.
- Name in Domain or URL – this isn’t always possible but if it is – having the phrase in the domain name or name of the page helps to rank for that phrase.
There are lots of other skills you need to learn on way to creating a successful online business, but none are difficult.
Have a play around with the Google keyword tool and find phrases or words that look interesting, maybe a local business could benefit (with your assistance) or you could set up sites of your own to target these phrases. Here’s the link to the tool, look for phrases with traffic that have two or more words as these have less competition.