What is SEO and where does it fit into your plan?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a class of techniques that are designed to enable your websites to be indexed and found and ranked better and more easily by the search engines.  The effect of properly executed SEO is that your web pages will rank higher for specific keywords in the organic listings on search engines.

Having the coveted #1 position for a highly searched phrase can mean enormous amounts of free targeted traffic.  The #1 spot receives approximately 40% of the traffic from searches.

There are two broad categories of SEO techniques: on site and off site.

On site things that you can do include:

• Using the right keywords with the right density, placement, and emphasis to convince the search engines that those are what the page is about.
• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is a technique for finding what words are related.  Google uses LSI algorithms to be able correlate searches for “oranges” with “fruit”.  In effect it prevents people from having a site about something but target totally unrelated keywords.
• Writing a robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content being indexed.
• Telling the search engines what parts of the page are not worth crawling.
• Having the right amount of text, and a good structure to your website that can be easily understood and perceived as valuable content.
• Having your images annotated to give more information to crawl
• Tricks like hiding text in images that you don’t want the search engine to read.
• Using layout properly to make it easy to digest your pages.
• Linking to the appropriate places.

Off site things you can do include:

• Anything you can do to create links back to your site
  • Create blogs on other sites that link back:
    • Wordpress
    • Blogger
    • Tumblr
    • Squidoo
  • Submit the site to indexes and directories
  • Submit pages to social networking sites:
    • Digg.com
    • Facebook
    • Del.icio.us
    • Mixx
    • Propellor
• Write articles and submit them to article sites
• Press Releases
• Link Exchanges
• Leave comments on other sites
• Participate in forums

In addition to be really successful with SEO you need to be keenly aware of your stats and how you got them, as well as what the stats are for your competitors.  You should track the links coming to you and going to your competitors.  The ability and dedication to be able to do SEO at this level would make you an expert.

One thing to keep in mind is that you should never trust your SEO to be outsourced.  The information gathered through doing SEO is a valuable asset to your business, and the knowledge of how to do it will give you a competitive advantage.  SEO is comparable to the advertising of traditional business.  You might consider outsourcing parts of your advertising to experts but you’d never tell some advertising company to just go ahead and do whatever they want.  The skills associated with advertising are such a core thing to business that it’s worth keeping it in house similar to SEO.

Now, while it’s worth knowing some SEO techniques and basic theory, at what point does it become a really concern to business?

My suggestion to you is to avoid SEO until you’ve established your conversion.  It takes a lot of time to do everything there is to do to boost your organic traffic so you should be certain that you can actually convert the traffic that you get into sales.  Otherwise it’s a lot of wasted effort.

There are so many times that I’ve found a niche that I was sure was going to work and it turned out to be a dud.  I’m glad in those cases that I didn’t spend a week working on building links and writing articles.  $50 on Adwords is enough to test your market so that’s where I start.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.