 Teacher Recommended
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Search Engine Optimization
 This is always a topic that is a bit confusing to those starting out in Internet marketing. Back
in the day, it used to be that you would simply design your website as well as you could and that was that.
Google(or any other search engine) would eventually find your site organically and hopefully you would
start appearing high up on the search engine results pages and begin making money online. That was
before people began paying attention the the search engine algorithms themselves. Keyword placement and the
linking structure(inbound, outbound and within the site itself) of your site began to take on paramount
importance. Things have gotten so out of hand in some cases that websites were actually banned by
the search engines because they were too aggressively trying to optimize the website.
Content would suffer and user experience was not positive.
The text on the page can become very stilted as the writer tries optimizing the page for
specific keywords. He or she becomes so obsessed with the optimizing function that the content of the page
suffers. There is no truer phrase in Internet marketing than "content is king" and the writing may
become so damaged because of optimization that the reader might actually leave the page because
of the forced quality of the writing and this, of course, defeats the whole purpose of getting traffic
to your site. Also, search engines have recently cracked down on websites that go over the top
with their optimization schemes. The last thing you want is the Google "death-kiss" that removes your site
from their index.
On the other hand, SEO is a powerful tool if you want better search rankings and therefore more
traffic and is one of the most important functions you will need to do to promote your website.
Seo breaks roughly into 2 broad categories: offline and online optimization.
Offline optimization deals primarily with keyword research and its' implementation, on both
the visible part of the site as well as behind the scenes. Keyword research consists of at least three
major steps:
-
discovery - finding as many keywords as possible relating to your Web site.
Online tools exist to speed up the discovery process by allowing marketers to search for
related keywords and their relative search popularity.
-
ROI analysis - finding the most valuable keywords for your Web site. The most
generic keywords are the most widely searched, but also the most competitive, and sometimes
bring mediocre conversion rates. Generally, phrases that most accurately describe
specific qualities of a site yield the highest ROI.
-
competitive analysis - analyzing the strength of competitors for potential
keywords. Competitive factors include how attentive sites are to optimization issues and the
number of relevant inbound links they have received.
Implementing the placement of your keywords throughout your
site, both the visible part and behind the scenes, is a complex but necessary task if you want to promote your
wesite properly. My top recommendations for successful keyword analysis are the Keyword
Elite and Wordtracker software
programs.
Online optimization is quite different and has nothing to do with the website itself. Here we
are trying to optimize the way in which search engines react to your site. Submitting your site to all the
major search engines as well as the larger site directories goes a long way to getting the search engines to
treat your website favorably. Ater all, if you build it they will NOT come, unless they can find you. The best
programs I have seen to successfully handle a site optimization campaign successfully are IBP and SEO Elite.
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