Search Engine Optimization - The Key to Driving Targeted Traffic to Your Website

Most internet marketers know that one of the best, if not the best, ways of driving traffic to your website is through a process called Search Engine Optimization, better know as SEO. First, what is SEO? And second, how does an internet marketer do it? Here are some answers.

There are two main types of SEO that you need to work with: on-page optimization, which refers to your own website, and off-page optimization that deals with references to your website that appear on other web pages. This article deals with on-page optimization.

Basically Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most targeted keyword phrases that relate to your site and making sure that these keywords cause your site to appear as high as possible in the search engine rankings. Thus, when someone searches for specific phrases, hopefully your keywords, the search engine lists your site at or near the beginning.

With on-page optimization, the most important thing is your keywords. For example, you set up a website about a health product that helps people cure their hiccups. You want to rank high in Google for the term "cure hiccups."

The first place to start is with the domain name. A domain name that contains your keywords is always good. Putting your main keyword(s) in your domain name gives Google and other search engines an idea of what your page is about when it first looks at your site.

Then there is your page title. The title tag will appear in the title bar of the browser when a visitor visits your web page and is another important factor in how a search engine decides to rank your web page. And all major web crawlers will use your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

A note of caution: Many small business owners make the mistake when they first design their website of placing their business name or firm name in every title of every page. But your firm name is probably not what your potential customers will be searching for until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

Next, you want to feature your keywords throughout your website. But keywords shouldn't be over used. If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. And how do you know if you've overused your keyword(s)?

There's a measurement called Keyword Density, which is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page. Suppose you have 150 words on your web page (excluding HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword 5 times in the content. The keyword density on that page is calculated by simply dividing the total number of keywords by the total number of words that appear on your web page and multiplying by 100. Thus the keyword density for that page equals 3 percent. To get recognized by the search engines, the accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, and you should never exceed it.

Remember, this guideline applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

If you have designed your website as a series of linked pages (not just a single home page), each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page, the keywords you use on that page, and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.

Something else to note is Google likes bold letters and looks at them as more important than letters that are not bold. This doesn't mean you make your whole site bold -- that's spamming them. But you can cautiously bold those keywords that you want to rank higher. So back to our hiccups example, your "cure hiccups" should probably be bold, because they're the important keywords of that page.

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From Patti Malone, Your Online Biz Genie with tons of ideas to put Magic into your Marketing!