SEO Tips for the internet challenged…

These days traffic is the key to survival in the online business world.  The most effective way to generate the kind of targeted traffic needed for online success is through some specific SEO Tips.  Most search engine users don’t give a second thought to the results that appear on their screen when they type in a search.  The manner in which these sites are chosen to display is probably one of the most important aspects of online marketing and could make or break your business.

So how do search engines choose which sites to match with which searches?  And more importantly what can you do to be one of the lucky sites to rank highly for a highly popular search term?  This article is going to help you understand just what the search engines are looking for and offer the SEO tips that will make you successful.

First of all, search engines are machines, not people.  These machines are not yet capable of positively identifying the exact contents of movies or images.  Sites with loads of flash content and very little descriptive text that can be understood and indexed by the engines will not rank well.  Flash content and videos have their place in a quality website, but remember that they do not tell the search engines what the subject matter of your site is or which terms to rank your site for.

SEO Tips to improve blog visibility

Keywords, keywords, keywords.  As important as location is for a physical business location, keywords are the backbone of your search engine traffic.  You should ask yourself what someone who is looking for what you are offering might search for online.  What exact term might they type?   Google has a keyword search tool that is in my opinion, absolutely necessary for creating a successful website.  Take the terms you have come up with and type them into googles keyword search tool.  This will give you a list of all the related keywords that people type into google.  It will also give you the number of monthly searches done for that exact keyword as well as the amount of competition you will have if you also try to rank your site for that keyword.  The idea here is to pick highly relevant, very popular key search terms with low or medium competition.  Say, one of the ideal keywords you find for your site is “bright green widgets.”  This term is searched for 10,000 times every month and there is low competition for it.  If you can manage to rank first for this keyword, you can count on half of the people that search for that keyword to visit your site.  That’s 5,000 people every month!  And that’s for a single search term.  If you reach page 1 of google’s results which would mean you are 1 of the top 10 results, then you share the other 5000 potential customers with the others on the page.  This still means hundreds of visitors each month for following just a few SEO tips.

Keywords are so important to ranking with the search engines that you should consider purchasing a url that has your most important keyword within it.  You should also use your keyword phrase multiple times on any page you are trying to rank.  There are other tricks such as bolding or underlining the term to indicate to the search engines that this term is an important part of your site content.  Add alt tags with your keywords to any images you might include in a post or page.  Yoast makes a nice plug in that will monitor the quality of your SEO efforts for each page and post in your site.  It will give you a score according to how well you follow their checklist for keyword optimization.  Highly useful and a must have for someone unfamiliar with the SEO process.

Include a site map and submit this site map to google!  Another crucial part of your development process.  Sign up for google webmaster tools.  You will receive a code that you must implement into your site.  There are plugins that make this a simple task.  Once again, Yoast does this for you and automatically creates a sitemap as well.  There are other plugins but I keep mentioning Yoast because it is free and easy to use.  Once you have a sitemap, which is essentially a road map of your website, you need to submit it to your webmaster tools account.  This tells google you are ready for traffic and gives them an easy to follow map of the sites they should index in order to start including you in their search results.

Now, the days of just cramming an obscene amount of keywords into a website with no form or informational value and ranking high in search results is over.  Another characteristic of your site that search engines will pay attention to is something called bounce rate.  Your sites bounce rate is a measurement of how long customers spend on your site when they visit.  Google notices if their users visit your site after searching “bright green widgets,” but never make it past the first page or spend very little time on your site at all.  If a large percentage of people quickly leave your site, google will assume they are not finding what they are looking for and will give you a high bounce rate.  This is why your actual content is very important.  Enticing customers with the right keywords is only half the battle.  You must then give them what you promised in the form of quality content.

SEO should be almost as important to your business website as the content itself.  The best content in the world is useless if no one ever finds it.  Follow these fundamental rules to gain the attention of search engines, and the free traffic you will generate will benefit your site more than any paid advertising.  If your business can benefit at all from an online presence, it will unquestionably benefit from SEO.