Wednesday, July 8, 2009

How to Use SEO to Your Business Advantage

Search Engine Marketing: Building Blocks for Your Business

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be one of your keys to lead-generated sales. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN exist to make lives easier for internet surfers out there, whether they are business owners, buyers or consumers, students or people who just need some distraction. The arrival of search engines has made things easier for people to find what they need to browse, using keywords for their searches.

This can work to your businesses' advantage, especially if you know how to manipulate keywords to serve your business through your website. All you need to do is work closely with your web design company in order to achieve the optimum results for your website. In short, you first need to coordinate and agree on three major things: content, keywords, and links. The rest, you can work out later.

SEO, at Your Own Risk

There is one thing that you need to look out for though-search engines, especially Google, hate SEO. This is because using SEO seems like we're duping the search engines into believing that our sites belong on the first page of their respective search rankings.

Therefore, we need to be cautious and careful with our SEO activities. It is best to stay under the radar rather than risk getting penalized for violating their rules. Getting a penalty will damage your chances of getting more traffic into your website. Less traffic equals less sales so be very careful.

The Basic Principles of Successful SEO

1. Content

Content will always be your best ticket to success when it comes to topping the ranks of search engines. However, your website needs a whole lot of content that needs to be updated regularly. Each page should target at least one specific keyword term.

You must develop well-written, keyword targeted content for your site that is updated consistently and monitored for rankability. Your business will enjoy the added benefit of an ever-growing resource library of information that your site visitors will enjoy and which will also help with your sales conversions.

2. Links

When it comes to links, what matters is inbound, one-way links from authoritative sites in your niche market. Page rank determines how authoritative a site is. Page Rank, or PR, is a ranking system Google devised to show how much weight or authority a particular site has.

You must negotiate inbound links on your behalf, concentrating on links from sites related to your market whose reputation thematically relates to the reputation you're trying to build. We also make sure these links deep-link into your website, meaning that they link to various pages in your website, rather than just to your homepage (also a sign that you're highly authoritative).

3. Visitor Behavior

If the people who visit your site don't stay that long, Google, Yahoo!, MSN take note of that and they tend to drop you from their page rankings because they would assume that you cannot offer anything relevant to your designated keyword. This is why site design, compelling content, and conversion analysis are important.

You must offer Website Conversion Optimization in addition to SEO to help you address this particular issue.

4. Human Idiosyncracies

Google has to be sure that human hands and brains are behind your website, not automated SEO robo-computers that do everything in programs and codes and produces hundreds of pages for your websites. Google is quick to pick up on automated SEO and is very strict about it. You will not only be dropped from the search rankings, you will forever be banned from all search engines.

Resources Taken from:
http://ezinearticles.com

No comments: