Chapter 2: Getting Traffic to Your Website 

Section 6: SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

You could make a career out of search engine optimization. It is a large field that is constantly expanding, growing, and changing. Don’t let this frustrate you or scare you away. It is also an incredibly powerful tool, allowing you the opportunity to get precisely targeted visitors to your website at either no, or very little, cost. The cost will be in your time to learn the basics, and implement them.

(FYI, click on the book below to download a great information source free about SEO. Very helpful when you have a little more time to read through it.)

As with most topics, the absolutely critical and most important aspects can be distilled to a surprisingly small list. This list of items, when implemented correctly, will be what gets you the bulk of your results. Let’s jump right in and take a look at the list, and then I will break it down into detailed instructions. DON’T spend your time trying to become an expert here, just apply the basics, get the critical tools, and be consistent.

Your efforts will take a little bit of time to pay off, but they will keep accumulating and eventually will absolultely transform your business. In addition, some of the more advanced topics later, like using video and social networks, can actually get you VERY QUICK and ASTOUNDING results. But that is for later…

Here is the list:

1. Proper keyword research - learn which keywords are searched most often, and collect info from your PPC campaigns on which keywords produce sales

2. Study your competition for the various keywords using keyword elite and seo elite. This will help you refine what your best targets will be. (both the most highly trafficked words, and the more specific words that are less trafficked but also much easier to get results for quickly.)

(These two important first steps were covered in the keyword research section.)

3. Assign one to three keywords to target for each webpage. The higher trafficked words should be targeted by your home page (and several hallway pages, to be discussed later), while the more specific words should be targeted on deeper pages.

4. For your targeted keywords, create an on-page optimization plan, and implement. This will generally be a one-time effort for each page.

5. Create an off-page optimization plan for each page. This includes getting links from other webpages to your page, and will be covered in the next section. This will include an ongoing implementation that you will do over time.

6. Keep track of your results, and adjust as needed. For online tools that will track all the important aspects of your website, view my webmaster tools section. (You can also add those tools directly to your site?)

Once you have completed steps 1 through 3, you will be optimizing each web page for your keywords. At the most basic level, you will want to be sure to include the keyword in your title, near the top of the page in an H1 header tag, several times throughout the page, and once near the end of the page. If possible, also have an outbound link using the keyword(s) as the anchor text (the text highlighted in blue that people actually click on.)

As a general rule, you should never have general, meaningless terms as your anchor text, like the phrase "click here" for instance. For a link that you don’t want the search engine spiders to follow, use the rel = "nofollow" tag in the html coding. (This would be the case if you don’t want to give pagerank to the page you are linking to. For an example of Google’s Pagerank algorithm, and what I mean by all of this, click here.) As an example of this, if you were linking to the site www.othersite.com with the anchor text of "MLM leads", your html would look like this:  <a href=www.othersite.com rel= "nofollow">MLM Leads</a>.

You can use SEOelite to check the top competitors for your keywords to find out how often they use the keywords in important places on their pages, like in the title, headers, links, keyword density, and more. Then, your goal simply is to perform a little better than them in those areas.

That will be a great first start, and is easy enough to monitor and change quickly. The trick comes in with implementing step number 5, which is more of a long-term process. For "off-page" optimization, you need to do basically two things: get links from other websites to your site (in both quantity and quality), and make sure the linking (or anchor) text used are your keywords, and not something general like your website address. There are several ways to do this, which we will be covering in the next three sections.

Note that this is the crash course in basic SEO. The foundation of SEO is always going to be content, content, content. Having quality content, and lots of it, will cast a wide net for the search engines, and give potential visitors many different ways to find you. Beyond producing quality content (and keep in mind you are free to use my articles, and you have a way to gain reprint rights to my articles also, which I will discuss in a couple chapters) and following these basic guidelines and the guidelines in the next three sections, there are a few other resources that I would recommend to learn more about this.

Remember though, my steps here will get you really far, if you have a focused plan and work on implementing it consistently. You DON’T need to be an expert here to get results. If you do want to learn more though, check out this e-book, and Stomping the Search Engine’s by Brad Fallon found here.

Now, on to this VERY important aspect of SEO: Getting links to your website …