Getting an advantage in the competitive online marketplace can be quite challenging. Once online marketers start to see some success, some have a tendency to put their head down and focus solely on the business at hand. This can lead to missing some of the other opportunities to gain business, like using SEO.
The top webmasters have an understanding of SEO and how it affects their sites. There are many myths about SEO and what it is, but even if you have never heard the term it can be easy to apply and benefit from SEO.
SEO is the process of making technical and stylistic changes to optimize your site. Technical SEO uses Meta Tags, Alt Image Tags and some off-page techniques. The stylistic adjustments are made in order to make the content more search engine friendly such as keyword density, bold text, title text, headings and other ways to highlight the most important keywords on your site, so the search engines can deliver accurate results to users.
The natural outcome of optimizing a site is increased traffic from search engines, and ranking higher in the results that are delivered to their users.
SEO may or may not mean changing the overall look of your site. Although, sometimes it is a good idea to make structural changes to a site to make it easier for the search engine to read the page. Small changes in headings, or re-focusing on keywords in the text can make a difference in your overall SEO.
Depending on how competitive your chosen keywords are, you can expect to see results from your SEO efforts fairly quickly, sometimes in just a few days. To start your SEO effort, however, use broader, less competitive keywords and work your way up to the more competitive ones. This way you can get the momentum going and gain PageRank to compete in the more competitive terms as you move up in the search results.
Tracking your website statistics is the best way to track your SEO and know if your SEO efforts are bringing the desired results. Basic statistics are included in most hosting packages, or you can check out GoogleAnalytics.
Pay attention to the source of your traffic as you analyze the data. When you start to see increasing referrals from the major search engines you know you efforts are working. Then, watch where your traffic is coming from on a geographic area. If you only ship to The US, you wouldn't want to attract visitors from Australia. If you sell globally, then you will be able to determine where you product is hot.
When using other advertising like pay per click etc, direct that traffic to special pages so you don't skew the results from your paid advertising.
SEO is far and away the best way to attract free, highly targeted traffic to your site. The increased traffic and sales that come from incorporating SEO into your marketing and advertising make it well worth the effort.
Rob Emmerson is a leading expert in SEO and has written extensivly on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers a free step-by-step SEO Course. In addition he writes a daily SEO Blog where he shares tips and tricks to improve your SEO.
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