CPAlead Campaigns

lundi 19 octobre 2009

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

By David Wittlinger

When you are ready to make an investment of time, money and effort into search engine optimization (SEO) it's important that you set realistic goals about the results that you are expecting to see. Many people know that SEO can be extremely beneficial for an online business, however they don't quite understand how the process works, or what they should expect.

To begin with, SEO marketing contains many different pieces, parts and strategies. All of them play an important role in helping the success of your website, and SEO campaigns are most successful when they utilize many different individual tactics. However, what remains at the core of all of this work and all of these strategies are keywords.

A keyword is simply the word or phrase that somebody types into a search engine to perform a query. With SEO, the goal is to specifically target the correct keywords, the ones that are popular without being overly competitive. These keywords will allow you to match your market, while also ensuring you will have a chance to rank highly. The best keywords are found through research, and the goal should be to find long tail keywords, which contain three or more words and are the best way to rank highly for specifically targeted consumers.

Once you know the actual keywords that people use for your niche or industry, you can then go about including them on your site as a piece of your search marketing game plan. The result is that you will end up seeing not just more traffic, but traffic that is truly targeted, which will result in more prospects and customers for your business.

The use of keywords for SEO can be applied in every step of the website design and development process. For example, by picking a domain name including one of your keywords, you give yourself a leg up on the competition already. You can then name your individual content pages with other keywords, targeting more phrases from the get-go and giving yourself a better chance of ranking highly.

However, many people have gone about this keyword inclusion in the entirely wrong manner. Most people new to the field follow a practice of keyword stuffing, or the excessive use of keywords in content that provides no real value to people who visit your site. This path will not only turn off site visitors, but could also result in you being penalized in the search engines. Therefore, it is clearly something to be avoided at all costs.

SEO marketing also entails work that is done off of the page's of your website. These strategies are collectively known as offsite search engine optimization. One of the main components here is link building, which is adding more incoming links that lead to your website and its pages. The more links the better, because they help to build your reputation and credibility.

Once you know some of the basic processes involved with SEO you will be able to dive in for yourself. You have to remember to have realistic expectations though about what kind of work you'll need to do, or what you would like to have done for you. Additionally, while there is an unlimited upside with SEO, there aren't any free lunches either. It's a process, and it can start working very quickly, but nothing is instantaneous or guaranteed when the competition is as fierce as it currently is with search marketing.

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