Using SEO Marketing to Build Your Online Business

The premise of SEO Marketing is this. It's not true that all you have to do is build a better mousetrap and watch the world beat a path to your door; instead, you have to let the world know about it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it's a set of methodologies you can use to simply and quickly help web spiders find your site, gauge its relative importance, and, most importantly, determine where to rank it on Google and other large-market-share search engines. Search engine marketing for your better mousetrap would target specific keywords used by people to find mousetraps: pest control, cats, get rid of rats. SEO marketing techniques help your site to rise toward the first returned site in searches for these terms.

To effectively use SEO marketing, the first thing you need to do is get into the head of the person searching – what terms would they use? Where would they look for a good mousetrap? -- and target those terms as keywords. Your website content would then be seeded with those specific terms so that it's clear to the search engine spiders that you are selling a great mousetrap, and then, with your site rising high in Google rankings, the world would beat a path to your site.

If you're thinking about this, you'll see several questions right away: first, where do you put the search terms? How much “seeding” do you need? And how do you set these terms up if you have many pictures?

Search terms in SEO marketing absolutely must be in visual text or text that can be visual; this is per Google's rules. This means that that cool Flash site you were planning for your website is out – not searchable. Instead, you'll need to write at least some content about your mousetrap: how effective it is, how many mice you'll catch. Putting your keywords in titles and headers gets you bonus points, so work to do that as much as possible. You can still use your pictures and flash – but put your search phrases in alt text tags. (If you don't know how to do this, look up HTML alt text for information). There is no effective difference between the most expensive host and discount web host in this process.

Next, you'll need to get other people to link to your better mousetrap site. There are hundreds of ways to do this: press releases (assuming your invention is important enough to merit news), buying advertising, getting people to review your product on their sites, posting to bulletin boards and including your link, giving away articles with your link back. This is difficult and time-consuming, but if you get a couple dozen good-quality links, you'll be rewarded with very good rankings in Google and other engines.

Finally, you need fresh information all the time. This is part of the reason blogs are so hot – they are constantly-updated information sources that Google loves. If your web site changes text frequently, it will boost your rankings considerably.

Do not use gateway pages, redirects, keyword stuffing or bulk submission tools/companies. These are common techniques used by black hat (cheater) SEO companies, and if they work in the short term, in the long term they can cause your page to sink to rock bottom in rankings. Scam SEO marketing companies (often operated out of Nigeria or Las Vegas, interestingly) commonly charge big bucks to raise your rankings, then vanish before you see the plunge that happens when Google and others catch up with their techniques. Use only the white hat techniques described above: good content, legitimate links back, and use of alt tags for graphic.

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