Da SEO Journal

There are many conflicting opinions about whether SEO (search engine optimization) is worth the expense. There are a few who say no, but most website owners agree that the key to advertising success on the internet is good rankings on the search engines. The right keywords in the right places can be the key to getting into the top ten rankings on most of the internet directories and search engines. If you can manage to place the right keywords in the right places, traffic to your site will increase significantly, and users will find your site quite easily. A comparison between conventional advertising and search engine optimization will show that companies, who invest in both, then decide to let the conventional advertising slide find that they really lost no business when they dropped the conventional advertising. Most of their business is generated on the internet and the higher they ranked in the search engines, the more new business they were able to obtain.

Companies that are thinking about investing in search engine optimization should remember that being found in the listings is not enough. Once a customer visits your site, there needs to be some degree of appeal or the customer will not stay there long. Your site needs to catch the customer’s eye and draw them in, ensuring a sale of your services or products. Your text content and your graphics should be professional in appearance, yet colorful enough to get the attention of the intended customer. Customers should realize that not every website will achieve the maximum results. In order for SEO to work, the customer must have a product that web surfers are looking for. The SEO industry has become a very competitive marketplace. The internet has grown so quickly in past years that search engines are now indexing hundreds of thousands of web pages. Web pages that are less than three to four years old stand much less of a chance of getting ranked high on the search engine listings. The point here is that search engine optimization is a long-term project. Keywords that work today may be of no use tomorrow.

This is why it is important to enlist the services of a good SEO specialist. Any reputable search engine optimizer will know the in’s and out’s of keyword articles, copywriting, and developing good, professional website appeal. The specialist will also recognize that more important than keyword placement is the targeting of potential customers. This means seeing the big picture; rethinking your goals. Remembering that when your search engine optimization specialist tells you that the problem with your website is not your keyword or its placement, they are only trying to clue you in to the fact that real search engine optimization can only be achieved by looking at the big picture. The big picture is a 360 degree view of your entire website and whether it meets the needs of the customer you are trying to target and then and only then can you come up with the content that will allow search engines to easily find you.

Did you ever hear the phrase, “Everything comes full circle”? The advertising business is what is called a cyclical process. A cyclical process is one where everything comes back to its original starting point. This is how it works. You have a product or an idea that you think you want to market over the internet. You then create a website yourself or you hire someone to do it for you. Before you can submit it to the search engines, you must optimize your site (called SEO, or search engine optimization). SEO is necessary to drive traffic or customers to your site. Customers search the internet through a search engine like Google or Yahoo, and they see your site and visit it. They decide to purchase a good or service from you. You have now generated a profit which you will not reinvest in new products or services to list on your site, which now must be optimized again… You get the idea. But, what drives this whole process? The search engines do because they are the ones sending customers to your site.

If you want customers to visit your site, you must get into the upper ranks of the major search engines. This does not mean you need to be number one. In fact, any SEO specialist that tells you he/she can make you number one on a major search engine is probably feeding a pile of lies. Most researchers will tell you that if you can get into positions four through eight, you are doing really well and it is there that you will stand the best chance for drawing customers. Spots one and two are usually reserved for high paying customers and very large companies.

There are several factors that will determine your success at SEO. The first is content. If you do not have professionally written content, you will not get your website listed high on the search results listings. Content does not mean keyword stuffing. That will get you banned from the search engines. You need to avoid using one keyword over and over. Use the three column technique to come up with a broad range of keyword phrases that are relevant to your site. Content means good quality ad copy that accurately describes the services or goods you are offering. Search engines have algorithms that they work by and one factor in that algorithm is the quality of your website’s content. Google’s executives will tell you that their goal is to find the most relevant sites, with the best quality content for the data that the user input to their search engines. Content is the key. If you are not comfortable with your content, hire a professional copywriter and ask them to work alongside your SEO specialist. “Two heads are better than one,” more than applies to this situation. Between the two of them, they should be able to develop content that will help you to score high with the search engines and get traffic to your site.

If you want to improve your position in the search engines listings, you must develop good quality content. Anyone who is anyone in the search engine optimization industry has heard the phrase, “Content is King.” The basic requirement of any website and the groundwork for search engine optimization is the content of the website. Please note that content does not mean keyword stuffing. Content needs to be professionally written ad copy that is easy to read and attractive to the web crawler. It also needs to be relevant to your website. Repetition or plagiarism is never acceptable. Keywords and keyword phrases should mesh well with your ad copy and sound natural to the reader. Ad copy should be both informative and interesting to your potential customers. Yes, your content should have your keywords and phrases in it, but they need to be strategically placed. Also, if you use a three column strategy to build a list of keywords that include principle keywords, lateral keywords, and secondary keywords, you will not have to worry about the search engine triggering its spam filter because you stuck too many of the same word into your content and it picked up on your search engine optimization.

Maintaining your keyword list needs to be an ongoing process. Everyday new words and products enter the marketplace and those words will at some point effect your website. If you are not on top of things, you will miss opportunities for new business. One other note about keywords, try to pick out keywords that are unique. For example, one search engine optimization guru once wrote about designing a website for McDonald’s. He stated that an unique keyword phrase for a McDonalds website would be “golden arches” or “big mac”. So you see, words that may originally sound irrelevant may bring you business that you would never have gotten any other way.

Your keywords and keyword phrases should be relevant to your entire site. The more specific you can make your keyword phrases, the better your search engine optimization will work. Ultimately, when a potential customer does a search on an engine, you want that search to generate as few results as it can, with your site near the top of the list. Make sure that your main keyword phrase is listed not only in the actual site content, but also in your description tag, your title, your header tag and your keyword tag. For long-term optimal results, you should be sure to always use ethical techniques when you do SEO for your site. This will ensure that the search engines look at your site favorably and that you will not trigger their spam filters, which may cause your site to be banned from their search engines altogether. If you can succeed in providing your potential customer with the information they are looking for, in an ethical way, you will undoubtedly start to generate significant profits.

Search engine optimization is all about traffic generation, which will eventually lead to profits for your business. Advertising costs are rising higher and higher every day. Driving traffic to your site by utilizing search engine optimization is a form of free advertising provided by the major search engines. The trick is to know how to optimize your web pages to make them as search engine friendly as possible. To do this you must have a good understanding of how search engines operate. Search engines are web pages set up in such a way that the user can input search criteria in order to have the search engine return results based on that criteria. Search engines then employ “spiders” or web crawlers to move across every page on the internet and find the most relevant and useful information and return those links to the user. It is important to note that the search engines do not return website addresses. They return web “page” addresses. One page of your site might be relevant while another may not. The search engine will provide the user with the direct link to the page of your site that meets the search criteria that they input.

So, the next thing to understand is how the search engines decide what is relevant and important. Search engines use ever changing algorithms, or mathematical statistical analysis, to look at a site and determine whether it is worthy of a ranking and how high that ranking should be on their search engine listings. One of the criteria in this analysis is keyword phrases and their placement throughout the website. Working alongside of those keywords are the internal links of the website.  The internal links are important to the keyword placement because they serve as a roadmap for your website. Think of your website as a tunnel and each individual page as a section of that tunnel. Your tunnel needs to be one long path that takes the web crawler through your entire site.  If your tunnel has many branches leading in many different directions, the web crawler will become confused and frustrated, and it will rank your site low on its ranking because there was no ease of navigation. Your internal links are related to your keywords because as the web crawler moves through your site, it is searching for information that it feels is important. Your keywords and keyword phrases will be the main clues for the web crawler as it moves along.

Keyword density used to be a big focal point for search engine optimization. It is not so much anymore. Most search engines no longer look as much for keywords as they do for good, relevant content. Your content should be clear vocabulary that makes the subject of that page obvious to both the search engines and the reader visiting the page. The biggest thing to remember is that the search engines are the tools that will drive the most traffic to your site. The benefits of search engine optimization and the amount of revenue you will generate by doing it cannot be emphasized enough. Your website will be made or broken by your choice of website design and content, and the amount of time you spend on search engine utilization.