Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an efficient way to improve your business website. Proper use of a few HTML elements and sensible formatting of content can raise your site’s position in web search results.

Search Engine Optimization can be summed up in one sentence, it simply means getting your website in favor with search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, so they send you lots of free traffic, then keeping your website in favor so they keep on sending you traffic! There’s no guarantee that your site will be shown on the first page of results (unless you pay), but SEO can make a big difference.

This article is an introduction to the broad topic of SEO and includes some simple improvements that can have far-reaching effects.

To get free targeted traffic from the search engines, you need to focus on two things:

1. Making sure that your website clearly tells the Search Engines what it’s about.
2. Making sure other sites are linking to your website.

The first is called “on-site” factors and includes things like

• Having keyword rich content that is relevant to your topic
• Making sure your titles and images are named using keywords
• Linking your pages to each other using your keywords

When you do this it helps the search engines to work out what your website is about. It obviously gets a little more complex than that, but look at it like a game of 20 questions. Make sure Google, Bing, and Yahoo only have to ask a few questions to figure out what your site is about. If they are at confused by what they find they won’t bother to index your content and your site won’t show up in search results.

The second thing you need to focus on is “Off-site” factors. That’s just getting other websites to link to your website. This is important, so focus at least 50% of your efforts on getting links to your site.

There are many ways of getting links to your site. For example:

• Article marketing
• Commenting on blogs
• Guest blogging
• Creating a Squidoo lens
• Posting links on Twitter & Facebook
• Using Stumble Upon
• Posting videos in You Tube
• Writing Press releases
• Commenting in forums

Take every opportunity you can to get links to your website from quality related websites, just schedule a little time each day and make sure you actually do it.

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The  NPD Group is recently measured search engine listings against banner ads, bulk email, and affiliate programs in a number of target markets. In all cases, natural search engine listings were far more fruitful and cost effective.

The reason for this is that  consumers are 12 times more likely to buy services and products they are actually searching for than with all the other Marketing approaches above, combined.

Simply submitting your web site to the search engines does not mean you will rank amongst the top 10, or the top 10,000 come to that!  Your website needs to be optimized in order to drive traffic/people to it in a way that  the search engines like.

This sounds simple doesn’t it? All you need to do is design your website and add content to it in such a way that search engines will be able to decide that the keyword phrases that people are searching for are most “relevant” to the product or service you are offering. You also need “relevant” people linking to your site in the correct way!

This is not as easy as it sounds, as only the people working for the search engines, such as Google, know how their searching algorithms work! Get it wrong and you could get “black listed” and no one will ever find your site.

Four Simple SEO Tips

You can, if you wish, make some simple changes to your website that will help your site rank much better in the search engines.

Here are some simple techniques that you can put into practice right away to get your website appearing near the top of the search engines:

1. Know exactly what your customers are searching for! Before you begin to market your site on the web, it’s vital you know exactly what the people you want to become your customers are looking for.

It allows you to find the most popular search words that people type into the search engines and helps you target the best keywords for the products or services that you offer. You can also use Google’s Free keyword tool in your Adwords account.

2. Include your keywords in your domain name, page  and file names. If you already have a website then you are stuck with it, unless you create a new domain name, which may cause more problems than it is worth, especially if you have a well established business. However, in reality it is not too much of a problem. But if you are creating a new website, then it is a good idea to have your main keyword included in your domain name.

For example, if you were an accountant in Sevenoaks and this was the search term you had acknowledged as being the best one for you, then you might consider the domain www.accountantinsevenoaks.com.

Then, each page on your website should be optimized for a different search term. For example, if we take “accountant in Sevenoaks” as an example, you might have a page under your main page which is about “book keeping”. You would name the file book-keeping-sevenoaks.html.

3. Write your website content so that it is appealing to the search engines. Do not make the mistake of thinking that just by adding your keywords all over the page will help your rankings. This can have a negative affect and your page could be penalised and drop down the rankings. This is known as keyword stuffing.

It still counts, but page content is increasingly less important. So here are some simple tips for writing good search-engine optimized body copy:

• Make sure your keyword appears in the first few words of the headline of your page.

• Make sure your search term appears once in every block of 125 words of body-copy and subheadings. It can appear anywhere in the block, (with the exception of the very first one, where it should be in the first 90 characters).

• Include at least one HTML text link thar contains your keyword in the link copy. The easiest way to do this is to have a link at the bottom of the page linking to the top e.g. “Back to top of book keeping”.

4. Once your site has been optimized for the search engines, you can begin the process of link building – getting high quality sites linking to you in the correct way.

If you apply these 4 tips to your website, you will increase your chances of getting highly-qualified traffic your website from the search engines, and, best of all it is FREE traffic.

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