SEO & Traffic Reports - Part 1: Getting Started Guide

What SEO Means to Your Business and Your Bottom Line.

If you own or are thinking of starting a business and you plan on having an online presence, your profits will be significantly affected by the number of people who visit your website. It just makes sense, right? The more people who visit your website, the more sales you’ll have.

So how do you get people to visit your website?

One of they key contributors to website success is your search engine ranking. Your search engine ranking is where your website shows up when someone, using Google, MSN, Yahoo, or any number of search engines, searches for your type of products or services. Search engines find your website with programs which scan the World Wide Web and seek keywords, links and other information.

Where your web site shows up on their search results is important. If you show up on page 30 or don’t show up at all, chances are high that they will miss you. If, however, your web site shows up on the first couple of pages, you’re doing well.

So how do you get your website on the first couple of pages? How do you get listed high in search engine rankings?

It is a question that challenges many owners. Some approach the task with an artistic flair, while others have developed highly scientific formulas for seeking optimal results. The answer, however, actually lies somewhere in the middle of art and science.

The art part.

There are many aspects of SEO or search engine optimization. Among the biggest contributors to a high page ranking are:

* Choosing the right keywords,
* Optimizing your content for those keywords,
* Optimizing your site for the keywords, and
* Linking practices.

The initial phase of choosing your keywords and keyword phrases involves creative brainstorming. What keywords will your customers and potential customers use to find you? How you use your keywords and the content you create is also a large part of optimization and extremely creative. We’ll get into the nitty gritty of both keyword choice and content creation in the next few lessons.

What’s creative about linking practices you may ask? The more websites that link to your website, the higher your ranking. It takes real creativity to generate and convince websites to link to you and we’ll talk more about exactly how to do that in the lesson on linking.


The science part.

Choosing your keywords involves a bit of research, testing, and statistics. Sounds like science class, right? We’ll there are no beakers and you don’t have to dissect any frogs but you will want to test and track your results. The more targeted your keywords, the better your search engine ranking and the more profits you make. Fortunately there are a number of tools to make this part of your job easier. You can find a number of these helpful tools at http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/seo/free-search-engine-optimization-tools.html

The same holds true for linking statistics. You can easily find out how many sites are linking to you, and to your competition, by using the Yahoo site explorer tool.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what SEO involves, lets move on to choosing your keywords.