Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Part 1

How to Leverage Internet Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business - Part 1 - SEO

The first step that you must take when you are building a successful internet marketing business is to develop your website. SEO refers to the attempt to drive additional website traffic to your business through the use of keywords that will help your website to rank higher among the various search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. A higher search engine rank will help drive more traffic to your website.

Your web pages, article postings and blog postings should take keywords into consideration when they are being written. There are various debates as to the percentage concentration of keywords on a page to be considered “optimized”, ranging from 2%-8%, meaning that you would repeat the keyword or keywords at that percentage throughout the individual piece.

A strategy to differentiate your business from the rest of the market on a search engine, is to choose a tighter business niche.

For example, if your business sells baseball equipment, you may be competing with millions of baseball and sports equipment companies on the internet, making it nearly impossible to get a decent search engine rank. If you choose to market baseball equipment that is marketed to left handed players in North America, your competition would be drastically reduced.

If you already have an established business, you will need to optimize your current site using keywords. If you are unsure of which keywords are the best for your site, consider using one of these tools:

• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

The problem with these keyword tools is that they are available to everyone, so if you only write content with these keywords, you will be competing with thousands, if not millions of other website owners for the same top ranks. Read the article on my favorite keyword research software. If you are writing about and selling a product or service that you are familiar with, it is not hard to naturally have keywords appear in your writing.

Once you are familiar with the keywords that are the best choices for your business, go back to your current site and review the existing content. Is there content that can be edited and enhanced? Make the necessary changes and then focus on all new content moving forward with SEO in mind. Be careful not to stuff your site full of keywords, as this can damage your relationship with search engines.

Now that you have the basic overview of SEO keywords, there are a few other tricks to help your site have a higher rank.

1. Be sure to use unique descriptions and meta tags on each of your web pages
2. Search engines love to use content that appears in header tags
            a. <h1> Page Title <h1>
            b. <h2> Subsection <h2>

To avoid spamming, each of your web pages should only have one <h1> tag, but can have as many <h2> tags as necessary. Click here to read more information about tags.

There are several things to avoid when you are optimizing your website, including: false redirects, keyword loading, pages stuffed with irrelevant keywords, duplicate content and the intentional misspellings of popular website names or keywords. Search engines can penalize your website if these techniques have been implemented.

When used effectively, SEO strategies can help to drive traffic to your website. These Niche Marketing Tools will also give you more ideas to help build your online business.