Search engine website optimization is critical to the survival of your business. With new sites and blogs appearing at a staggering rate, everyone is scrapping and clawing trying to get to “Page One”. After all, statistics show that if you can’t make it to page one, your traffic is likely to be negligible. You can buy your way on to page one, but to do that you better have a substantial marketing budget and, even if you do, statistics are also showing that the paid ads are getting less and less attention as consumers realize that they are just that- paid advertisements. So the goal becomes a game of landing on page one “organically”. This means it happens naturally rather than through paid methods. How do you make this happen efficiently and quickly? Well, in order to have the best chance, it takes strategic planning prior to designing your website. Let’s get a bit deeper into this.
Keyword Research and Selection
Search engine website optimization begins right here. It is the MOST critical step and few (if any) experts would disagree. Unfortunately, too many new website owners don’t even think about this until it is too late. They may talk about “optimizing” their site, but what keywords are they targeting and how were these keywords chosen. You may be surprised to find out how many internet “newbies” can not answer this question. In fact, they may be paying someone right now to optimize their site and they still have not done any critical market keyword research nor do they know how to do it (which is pretty much throwing money away). Allow me to use a specific example…
Perhaps you want to start an online store selling dog clothes. It’s a decent market and people like to spend money on their pets so why not. Now, you talk to a web designer and they promise to build you a great site and optimize it. But what the heck does that mean? What keywords will be targeted? Well, the novice will make the common mistake of wanting to optimize for keywords such as “dog clothes” and “dog clothing” and maybe even a variation like “dog apparel”. Six months later they are frustrated because they are not on page one, they have spent thousands of dollars, they have little web traffic, and few sales. Why? Because they failed to do any keyword research and tried to tackle enormously competitive keywords. It’s like a high school freshman trying to play quarterback in the NFL. It will never happen. You have to learn how to play before you can compete at that level!
Domain Name
Another critical step with search engine website optimization occurs with your choice of domain name. Did you pick a fun and fancy name or did you try to incorporate keywords into your domain name? If you opt for cute and fancy, that’s fine, but realize that if all things are equal, fun and fancy will lose out to a domain with great keywords nearly every time! Want proof? Go do a Google search for “Dog Clothing” and (surprise) #1 is a company with the domain name “uniquedogclothing.com” even though every other site on page one has far more back links!
Listen, search engine website optimization is a very complex animal. Those that completely understand it have studied it for months and years. And to make it tougher, just when you think you might understand it, Google changes the rules as they did in their recent Caffeine Update. But, competition in every niche gets tougher every day, and the bottom line is that if you don’t run your online site or business properly, you could be headed for disaster, if you’re not already there. Keyword research and a good domain name are were it all starts.
Most “gurus” out there will charge you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to teach you how to do these things. The good news… I don’t! You see, I believe that information should be free. That’s why I’ve developed my online marketing bootcamp where I teach these principles without charging a penny. Take a look at all of the free info on my blog and consider how I might be able to help you.
As always, I wish you the best of success!
