Driving Prospects to Your Site Using Search Engine Optimization

In addition to having your ad show up in the sponsored section of a search engine’s results, you can have your site show up in the organic results. And to do that, you need to optimize your site for the search engines.
Here’s how…

Selecting Targeted Keywords

Your first step is to select the keywords your target market is already searching for in the search engines. Just as you chose targeted keywords when you created your PPC campaign, you should similarly choose targeted keywords here as well.
TIP : People will say that because it’s “free” traffic, you can optimize for even the most broad keyword. However, time is money. And it’s either going to take money or time for you to optimize your pages for the search engines. As such, it makes sense for you to primarily focus creating content and pages around highly targeted keywords. Once you start seeing results, you may consider optimizing for broader keywords. You can use your favorite keyword tool such as the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Here’s what you’re looking for – words that get a decent number of searches each month, but yet they don’t have much competition. That means it’s easier for you to rank well for these words. And while you may not get a lot of traffic from each individual keyword, collectively the traffic adds up fast.
TIP : People refer to these words as “long tail” keywords, as they tend to be multiple-word, specific phrases. Be sure to also choose geo-targeted keywords. Once you have a list of words, move on to the next step…

Creating Content and Pages Around These Keywords

Your next step is to choose up to two of your keyword phrases and create content and pages around these words (this is referred to as onsite optimization).
You may create a page on your website that includes an article – or you may create an optimized article and add it to your blog.
Here’s what to do:

• Use the keywords in your article title.
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  Sprinkle the keywords throughout your article at about a 2%-3% density rate (meaning your keywords show up two or three times for every 100 words on the page). But don’t use your words much more than that, or the search engines may rank your pages low because of suspected “spam.”

TIP : Don’t sacrifice readability just to get your keywords into the article. The offsite optimization (which you’ll learn about in a moment) tends to have a bigger impact than your onsite optimization. So while your keywords should appear several times on your page, make sure you’re writing for your human readers and not for the search engines.

• Create page titles using these keywords.
• Insertthekeywordsinyour filename title (e.g.,www.yourdomain.com/your_keyword.html).
• Add the keywords (where appropriate) in your navigation menu and elsewhere on the page such as in your “alt tags” for images, your image filenames, etc.
• Insert your keywords into your meta tags (in the source file of your document) and write a compelling description. While the big search engines don’t use meta tags for ranking purposes, some of the smaller search engines still do (so it doesn’t hurt).

The description is important, however, since it’s often displayed in the search engine results to the prospect – and it can make the difference of whether they click on your site or not.

Using Offsite Optimization

The second part of SEO (search engine optimization) is referred to as offsite optimization – and the main idea is to get one-way incoming links from other relevant, quality sites.
Offsite optimization is considered even more important than onsite optimization. And that’s because the webmaster solely controls the onsite optimization. He tells the search engines what his site is about. But the search engine has no way of knowing whether the content on the site is any good (or whether it’s just “junk content” that has the keywords repeated throughout gibberish).
The solution? Most of the bigger search engines (like Google) count incoming links when considering how well to rank a site.
You can think of each incoming link as a “vote” of confidence for your site. The more “votes” you have from relevant, quality sites, the more you’ll be rewarded
by the search engines. You may get your site crawled more often by search engine bots, which helps your content get indexed quickly. And you may get a higher Google page rank (PR), which often leads to higher rankings for your keywords (versus if your site had little or no PR).
However, some “votes” (links) count more than others. These include:

• Links from sites with high PR.
• Links from sites that are highly related to your site.
• Links from “good neighborhoods,” such as authority sites, .edu sites, .gov sites, etc. (Bad neighborhoods tend to be spammy sites, link farms and other low-quality sites.)
• One-way incoming links are better than reciprocal links.

Now before you run out and get links from high PR authority sites in the same niche as your site, you’ll need to take into consideration your anchor text. This refers to the clickable words that make up your link.
You see, most people have links like this: “To learn more about hog farming, click here,” where the “click here” is the anchor text (i.e., the actual link). However, “click here” as your anchor text does absolutely nothing to help your search engine rankings… unless you’re trying to rank for those words. Instead, you need to make your keywords your anchor text. In the above
example, the clickable part of the link should be the words “hog farming.” Your anchor text will be the keywords you optimized the content for when you created the page you’re linking to.

Here are eight proven ways to get one-way incoming links:

1. Submit your site to local directories. This includes city, region, state, province and country directories.

2. Submit your site to niche-specific directories.

3. If you have special features on your site like a blog, forum, or newsletter, than you can submit your site to blog, forum and newsletter directories.

4. Create content around your keywords and submit these articles to article directories. The top article directories include EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, IdeaMarketers.com, GoArticles.com and similar. You may also seek out niche-specific directories.

5. Create keyword-rich, quality content on sites like Squidoo.com, Yahoo! Answers, HubPages.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com and other social media sites. (You’ll learn more about social media marketing in the next chapter.)

6. Comment on related blogs. (TIP: Check the source file on the blog to make sure you have a “do follow” link tag, otherwise the link won’t help your search engine rankings. Of course you may still get human visitors clicking directly through to your site.)

7. Post on related niche forums.

8. Swap content (or even just links) with other bloggers and webmasters. Avoid reciprocal links when possible. For example, if you have two related sites, then you can link your Site A to the other webmaster’s site, and that webmaster can link to your Site B. That way, all links are one-way incoming links.

Ranking well in the search engines depends on the following:

1. Your ability to choose targeted keywords with low to medium amounts of competition.

2. Your onsite optimization efforts (where you create keyword-rich content and pages around your keywords).

3. Your offsite optimization efforts (where you get quality one-way incoming links that use your keywords as the anchor text).