Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that is used to describe the process by which traffic to a particular site is increasingly generated by search engines by way of search results. The quality of visitor traffic to a site can be measured by analyzing how often a visitor who uses a specific keyword phrase in a search actually performs what is known as a “conversion action.” That is, how often those visitors make a purchase, download materials, request information, or interact with the site in any other way that indicates interest in the product or service the site offers. SEO is the bed rock of internet marketing and I strongly recommend that you start SEO right after you have built your website.
Step 1: Discover who’s looking for you
Start by thinking about your customers. Who’s looking for you, and what terms would they type into a search engine query box to find you? The terms that they’d type into the search engines are your site’s pages keywords and key phrases. Make a list of these keywords. If your site has been online for a few months, scan your referrer logs to see what keywords your visitors used. Because the search engines are basically just indexing software, your keywords are the keys to the SEO kingdom.
You’ll use your lists of keywords and phrases as you optimize all your Web pages.
Use the keywords in: your page titles, your page descriptions, your meta tags, and of course in the content on the pages themselves. You should also use your keywords in internal links across your Web site. It’s wise to get other site owners to link to you using the keywords for which you want to be found too. This tells the search engines exactly what your pages are about, and when the pages should be returned in the query results.
Optimize every page on your site with keywords which are specific to your site, as well as to each individual page. Aim to create around 300 to 800 words on each page. Although you won’t manage lots of content for every page — some pages don’t need it — the more text you can get onto your pages which includes your keywords the better.
Step 2: Create landing pages that sell
The strategy to optimize your Web site to get traffic and to make sales is to optimize each page, as well as to create specific “landing pages” for your site. This is because your pages get to the top of the search engine results pages, known as the SERPs, your sites don’t. (The SERPs are the search engine pages which are returned when people enter search queries into the search engines’ query fields.)
Landing pages are simply web pages where visitors are directed to whenever they click a result in a web search or whenever they click a web ad.
Step 3: Realize that landing page content is the emperor
Modern landing pages usually contain more content. They also affect other aspects of Internet marketing such as quality scores for your pay per click (PPC) campaigns. Sophisticated advertising platforms such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing analyzes the landing page and assign it with a quality score.
The quality is affected by several factors. For instance, Adwords recently added the loading time of the landing page as one of the factors affecting quality score. The higher your quality score, the lower the bids. In other words, when you have a high quality score PPC campaign, your ad may appear higher in ranking even though you and your competitor may have the same bids.
Landing pages are sometimes called “Web sales pages”. Often they’re developed as the landing point, so to speak, for PPC advertising. These pages usually have a lot of content, which makes them magnetic to the search engines.
Think of your landing pages as entry points, or destination pages, for your site. You want your landing pages to stand out — they’re the most important pages on your site.
Because they are so important, you’ll want to create many landing pages for your site: these will be special pages that you create specifically for keywords for which you want to be discovered in the search engines. Consider creating a landing (sales) page with unique, information-rich content for each product and service that you sell.