When someone uses a search engine they type in a keyword or key phrase and the search engine returns relevant results. The traffic you receive from this is referred to as organic search engine traffic. Search engine optimization increases traffic to your website and you will not have to pay one penny for it. Does that sound like something you might be interested in?

SEO can get pretty tedious and complicated but do not let that stop or scare you from optimizing your website. The effort will be extremely worthwhile when the free organic traffic starts rolling in!

Here are some basic SEO tips that you can use on your website right now.

1. Picking keywords of two or more words can increase your success rate. Choosing single word keywords usually have a higher amount of competition associated with them.

2. Insert keywords into the title tag of your web page so search engines know what your page is about. Failing to perform this simple step can result in your web page being ranked in a lower position when it does not deserve to be. Try to create titles containing the two or three choice key phrases that you are targeting. Make your titles relatively short and interesting. Your title will serve as a method of getting the visitor interested in reading your page further and increase the chance of the visitor clicking the link.

3. Another major SEO activity involves evaluating the link popularity of your website. Creating good quality links also improves your ranking with the search engines. The goal is not to link with any website, but link to websites that complement your content. Your website will get penalized by the search engines for linking to low quality websites such as free for all link farms. Link farms are websites that were created for the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity of a website.

4. Use the html bold tags or highlighting around your most important keywords appearing near the top of each page. You only need to do this once or twice. Do not use them everywhere the keyword appears because that does not help. Your most important keywords and key phrases should appear in the first few paragraphs of the text on the web page.

5. Submit articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. This creates high quality long-term links that stay active in the archives for years to come. You can also exchange articles with other website owners. The content of the articles should complement the content contained on both websites. This is much better than doing a simple link exchange because of shared content and search engines love to deliver high quality content in search results.

Internet marketing can seem mystifying not only for beginners, but for moderately skilled internet marketers. With all the courses, forums, blogs, reports, seminars and teleconferences available to help people learn how to get traffic to their sites, it is one of the most overwhelmingly dense subjects on the internet.

Unfortunately, and this is perfectly true, most of the advice or “expert” tips are outdated or completely false. Since anyone can publish on the internet, you have a mixed bag of good information followed with much more bad information.

The mysticism of internet marketing is created largely by this glut of some good and mostly bad information. It makes the whole topic SEEM like rocket science when, in fact, much of what was true about internet marketing years ago is true today.

Most people think that since search engine marketing changes every five minutes, that ALL internet marketing tactics must have changed as much in the same amount of time. Not true.

The basics, like trading links, article syndication, testimonials, forum signatures, joint ventures, affiliate programs – most work as well today as they did years ago. That is, if you know how to value the work above for what it will truly do for your website traffic.

Funny thing is, no one places much value on the above tactics anymore because there is always some “new” tactic around the corner that claims the death of everything that came before it. And most people blindly follow that advice as if it were true.

Most of the time, this is to the detriment of their internet marketing efforts. The basics are what work all the time and what have always worked on the internet.

You can always experiment with new things, as long as you have not forgotten to do the basics. The basics proven to drive traffic, page rank, link popularity, and branding to your business.

Conservative, relevant reciprocal linking

Article syndication

Participation in your field and among your market (forums)

Blogging

Offline advertising

Non-reciprocal linking tactics

Press releases

…and many other proven methods.

Everything else is just a big experiment until proven to work over time. “Over time” being the operative words. Lots of flash in the pan crack pot schemes work for awhile. But most never stand the test of time.

Links from a widely syndicated article will never fade away, yet I see people chasing down fly-by-night linking pyramid schemes as if they truly believe something like that is a smart thing to base their internet business on!

Tens of thousands have walked away from their dreams, gone back to their depressing, predictable, slave-labor jobs never knowing how close they were to actually succeeding.

Good people have left this business proclaiming it an utter lie that any average person can make it with an internet business and an internet marketing plan.

I guess there is truth in that statement. Average people do in fact quit this business before they ever get started because average people fall for tricks and schemes that above average people avoid on their way to success.

If you have read this far, you are probably in the above average category. Why? Because average people would have take one look at the list of things I mentioned that are the bread and butter of internet marketing and saw nothing but hard work. And they’d be right!

Above average people don’t shy away from work though. I don’t know a single soul (and my rolodex has some of the biggest names in internet marketing in it) who got where they are today without a lot of hard work.

You can succeed in internet marketing if you are not afraid to work, and not constantly tempted by those who say you can succeed without it!

Focus on the basics of internet marketing and stay with them as you try new strategies. We all experiment. But successful internet marketers never leave their bread and butter tactics behind unless they cease to be effective.

Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey

Yes, SEO does work. That’s the short answer! The longer answer is that YOU have to work at it to make it work!

If you think that submitting your website’s URL (your website address) to Google or any of the other top search engines, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. is going to make your site magically appear in their search results, guess what? It ain’t gonna happen. And if you seriously believe that you can use one of those SEO services that will submit your website to 500 search engines for 34.95… umm, guess what? It’s not only NOT gonna happen, (getting a top ranking on Google for instance), you’re also going to find your site blacklisted for spamming. So save your 35 dollars and I’ll give you a couple of tips towards SEO that works and all you have to do is do a little work.

Google likes link popularity – that is the more websites which have a link to yours increases your popularity and therefore (at least in theory), the quality of your site. So, start sending out your Christmas cards now! In other words, find out who your competition is, as well as other sites who are in the same business as you and fire off a polite email to the respective webmasters enquiring if they’d be interested in swapping links with you. More links to you means quality in the eyes of the infamous GoogleBot and that means a higher ranking on Google’s results pages and that means more customers to your site.

Content is King. Google likes up-to-date fresh content. Update or add new information to your site on a regular basis. Like once a day if you can! Show the GoogleBot that your business is alive and well and not some Internet artifact. Write new articles about your products or services, or update existing ones. Start a blog. Open a forum. There’s all kinds of neat, easy-to-do things you can do which keeps your site actual, both for the search engines and your prospective clients.

Optimize your site for the keywords that you use in your content. And I don’t mean, slap a whole bunch of keywords into the keywords METATAG and hope for the best. Google doesn’t even look at METATAGS anymore (except TITLE) – you’ll do more harm than good using METATAGs, so lose ‘em. What I mean by optimizing your keywords is using words and descriptions which properly describe your business, your products or your services within the content of your site. Good copy makes for good keywords. Don’t write paragraphs and paragraphs of garbage that’s just filler which says nothing useful about your products/services. Learn to write descriptive, snappy bits and bytes that reflect your goods and makes them appealing. Remember visitors want instant, accurate information about your products and have very little time or inclination to waddle through a lot of BS. So keep it short, simple and descriptive! And that’s how you optimize your keywords in the process.

More tomorrow… I’m off for coffee and my daily SEO report for many of the sites I’m responsible for getting ‘googledbygoogle’

Have a great day!

chocolate favors