We all know that getting traffic to your site is the most important factor to converting sales and bringing home the bacon. PPC is the fastest way to get an extraordinary amount of traffic in very little time. Unfortunately Adwords and other PPC programs are a double edge sword, you really must know what you are doing or else you can really burn through some cash. I ‘m sure most of you already know about that. What if you could get FREE traffic? Yes I do mean organic traffic supplied by none other than search engines.

A good way to do this is to target a keyword with little competition that gets searched a lot and also converts into sales. Usually adding the keyword to both the title tag and your H tags will drastically help your rankings in the serps, but what many fail to do is purchase a domain with the primary keyword in the domain. Believe it or not I have put up sites with just the keyword as the domain, added a couple great articles and listed on the first page of Google within a month. (This is NO joke) That’s without a link campaign, literally no work involved. So for your next project put this tip to the test, do your research and buy a domain with your primary keyword. Spend a little time on your on page optimization but concentrate on getting a few quality back links and start watching your site climb to the top! More tips to come soon.

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As even the intermediate affiliate marketer has already determined, the key to internet revenue generation success is in advancing of your search engine optimization to bring your site to the top of the list of general search results.  There are complicated algorithms involved in many of the search engine databases which have made SEO tactics more difficult to implement, but there are still some basic guidelines to follow which will, in addition to more detailed use of specific optimization tools, secure your listing and increase your site traffic.

Find the Best Keywords

Use of a program such as Wordtracker to aide in the identification of the most popular keywords for your topic can be very useful.  Basically an online thesaurus with additional marketing data thrown in to compensate for specifics in your market niche, these types of programs not only help provide the most common keywords online searchers will use, but also identify the competition by providing reverse or opposition keywords that are used if the person searching the net poses a topic in question form.

Optimize Your Title

Be sure to identify the most important component driving your business in its title, to produce the most relevant number of hits.   If the point of your website is to advertise your dog grooming shop, be sure your city and state are part of the title keywords, since you are trying to appeal to customers in your geographical area.  If your website product is something fairly complicated, use a generic descriptive phrase in your title, as many people many not know the technical jargon, but know how to describe what they need and likely searched the topic in a question format.

Discover Your Competitors

Knowing who your competition is, and understanding the advantages of your product over theirs is a great way to snag new customers who may be disappointed in the results of your competition’s product.  Using a mildly negative phrase in your keyword list will drive your listing to the top of the search engine for those consumers who are banging on the keyboard after a bad experience with the competition.

Use Headings

Short phrases throughout your site to highlight important points will increase search engine listings and can be easily scanned by the consumer for relevance.

Use Title and ALT Attributes

Effectively using Title and ALT attributes in your page content will prompt positive results from human visitors to your site, as well as search engine spiders.  The ALT attribute is a descriptive text which is displayed before the download of images and is useful in providing information to browsers that do not support image downloads as well as sight impaired visitors to your site.

Title attributes describe links, tables and other structural HTML elements and are read my many search engine algorithms as regular page content, therefore resulting in higher list rankings. 

Install a sitemap.xml for Google

A site map will act as a directory of the pages on your website, hyperlinking each page on your site.  Not only good for getting search engine spiders to follow your page links but also helps your visitors quickly find what they are searching for.

Get Relevant Backlinks from High Quality Sites

Getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories is a great way to obtain backlinks, after, of course, researching the promoting sites on your own to determine if the market niche is appropriate for linking to your site.

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We pick up here where we left off last time. We had just discussed the importance of unique and consistent users as well as the current state of content. Today we will discuss the other 2 huge concerns for any launching website.

Design: Size may not matter but looks sure do. Which of us hasn’t been searching for content or information and the web and rejected a website not for it’s content but because it was hard to read or navigate? Your website doesn’t have to be the most beautiful and complex. In short it just needs to be easily accessible to as many users as possible. What does this involve? Consider the following:

Colors: Make sure all colors match in all web browser formats. Test them in as many formats as possible. There are many color wheel web site matching color sites on-line…take advantage of them.

Access to Info: Don’t be sneaky and out smart yourself. I’ve seen many websites that try to lead you to a PPC or Affiliate site without offering any benefit. Though you may get the inebriated or otherwise distracted click…most users hate this technique and will leave your site.

KISS: As they say…keep it simple stupid: Keep your content relevant and encourage outside input. Address the most common concerns of your reader first and always provide a forum for feedback. Most readers who submit comments or questions will come back for a response…even if they hated your original post.

Linking: As we discussed earlier in the ‘Red Queen Theory’, for every advancement a predator makes…the prey must also advance. In this case, most search engines have algorithms and formulas that are designed to recognize useless links. For example, if you have a site that sells or provides information for teens…a link to a pornographic site is not a valid link. This is easily obtained through linking software and outsourcing but provides no real value to website, even if that site has a million hits.

Most websites will still supply linking but only with approval. For instance, if you provide business consulting most sites will ask to see your web page, portfolio, and have a phone call or other contact before an exchange takes place. This is a good policy for long-term web-sites since some websites may actually lower your SEO ratings.

In conclusion, the days of the quick get rich web schemes are gone. You should look at your website as a long-term not short-term investment. Plan for an initial investment and schedule a promotional budget for the first year. Only on the Internet do people believe that a venture can make them rich overnight. It may still happen…but it is the exception and certainly not the rule.

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Do you remember when search engine optimization meant nothing more then building a website with keywords and search engine submission. The world of the web has changed a great deal since then. In psychology they have a predator/prey relationship known as the ‘Red Queen Theory’. This name comes from famous idea communicated in “Through the Looking Glass”, better known as “Alice in Wonderland”. Upon arriving in the kingdom of the Red Queen, Alice discovers that people have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place. The same is true in the world of nature. The ‘Red Queen Theory’ represents the idea that for every advancement of the predator the prey also advances; thus we all run as fast as we can to keep our place. So, what does this have to do with SEO?

In the beginning we all figured out how the search engines were rating pages; the methods were pretty straight forward. Pages were basically ranked by the number of relevant keywords and popularity. Popularity could be established via search engines, advertising, or paying firms to directly visit a number of times. However, as people began to exploit the weaknesses of this system, the system evolved. In fact, no one but a precious few Google employees knows how they rate their websites in total now. However, there are some methods being promoted that have come to light that are proven to improve your web site rankings. The following is the first in a series directing you on how to use the most common methods and an explanation of the correct/incorrect ways to utilize them.

Unique and Constant Users: It is nice to get unique users but there is reason to believe that pages are also ranked by the amount of consistent traffic they receive. It is pretty easy and cheap to get a “one hit wonder” site and search engines have figured this out. You can go to an outsourcing site and for about $.25 per hit, you can pay for as many ‘unique’ web hits as you want. This is why most sites now consider not only unique users but consistent users. To gain this audience it is important to provide content that is useful and compelling. You must offer content that will draw visitors which brings us to…

Article/Web Content: Article and web content can also be obtained through outsourcing. Understand, the days of plagiarism whether from another source or yourself are over. Search engines will penalize you if they see the same content repeated on more than one page. ‘Article Spinning’ was created to provide a simple answer to this. Simply put, ‘Article Spinning’ is taking the content from one article and changing the words just enough to try and fool the search engines so they recognize it as new content. There are even software programs to take a single article and spin it into many. This is still somewhat effective, however, search engines have begun more extensive searches to look for this method and as the software is introduced to the public, it is also incorporated by the search engines. If you want to effectively promote your site…it is important that you have authentically valuable content. The web has grown to large to compete with anything less. You can still use outsourcing, but put thought into what content you want to offer and specify your articles as much as possible.

Keywords: SEO 101

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Understanding the meaning of search engine optimization (SEO) - It’s the process of improving the amount of volume of traffic to a website via natural or organic results through the search engines. The higher you rank, ultimately the more visitors you will receive depending on if your site is optimized for the proper keywords.

SEO can target many different types of natural searches, from image search, video search and local search. To really understand SEO you must have a somewhat understanding of how the algorithms work and what people search for. Things that help to create higher rankings include:

• Making sure your code is clean
• Using the proper linking structure
• Making sure your site can be crawled
• Using the proper meta data
• Adding good unique content

There are different kinds of SEO, white hat and “Black Hat” tactics being the more popular terms that you will hear about. You want to steer clear of blackout SEO which is any method that tries to trick the search engines into giving you a higher ranking. Things that are considered black hat SEO tricks: Using link farms and keyword stuffing. I hope this post helps clarify and explain exactly what SEO is in Layman’s terms.

Keywords: What is SEO | SEO | SEO for beginners

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