Search Engine Optimization – Part One

We’re going to cover a variety of free traffic strategies over the next few weeks. To start off, we’ll be looking at search engine optimization (SEO) for the next three days. So, let’s get started …

When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), there are both on-site and off-site factors to consider.

With on-site SEO, you are setting up your pages so that they are optimized to include your primary keywords, anchor text and an internal linking structure that allows for spiders (crawlers) to effectively index your website and help you rank for specific keywords.

Then, when visitors using search engines like http://www.Google.com enter in keyword phrases searching for specific information, your website can appear in the search results if you have properly optimized your site for the same keyword or keyword phrase that was entered.

Part of SEO also involves off-site SEO, which is primarily focused on link building. The more high quality, relevant links that point to your website from external sources, the more weight your website is given in the search engines, causing your site to appear more frequently when specific (related) keywords are entered, triggering your site to show up in the results window.

One thing to keep in mind as well, is that sites hosted on the same IP address as yours will carry less weight, so if you have a network of sites hosted on the same server linking to each other, it won’t be as useful in your incoming link strategy as those sites hosted on other servers.

Of course, this is a brief summary of what SEO is. In truth, optimizing your website for the search engines and building an effective SEO campaign takes time and effort.

Furthermore, don’t expect instant results from your work, SEO is often a slower performing method of generating traffic, however once you’ve set it up, you only need to continue optimizing new pages that you add to your site in order to retain your foothold in the search engines.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at onsite SEO.

POSTED BY Rick on Apr 8 under Marketing Tools