Don’t be intimidated either by acronyms like ‘SEO’ or big words that sound technical like ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO). ‘There is nothing to fear except fear itself’ and in fact fear of the unknown can really be the only obstacle that keeps us from doing what we need to do. This is a shame when there is actually nothing to fear. As they say, ‘this is not rocket science’ – that is it is not difficult – you just need to become acquainted with the concepts. It’s actually simple if you will just look at it rather than to assume you ‘don’t know how’ or ‘can’t do it’.
Sometimes there is more than one way to approach things. In the case of an Internet business everything revolves around getting customers the same as any business offline. While list building (leads and prospects) is important and one way we should be going, we should also give some energy to learning how to generate free traffic from the search engines like Google.com, Bing.com, and Yahoo.com.
The primary concepts in SEO fit together like a puzzle so let’s take each piece and briefly define it.
#1 Is using keywords and keyword phrases in creating content. For example if you have an online affiliate marketing home business, then some relevant keywords would be for example, ‘affiliate marketing’, ‘making money online’, ‘home business’, ‘work from home’, and similar related terms.
#2 Creating content that has value is not exactly the same thing as just blatant advertising like ‘join my program at abc.com and work from home’. (although certainly part of the content you will create are ads both long and short for various mediums). Creating content that has value would be something that provides information that people need or would enjoy or like to read. Ideally content is compelling and attractive. In this particular example we are building, let’s say you are using your blog to post content.
#3 On a regular basis, the search engines will ‘crawl’ (access) and ‘index’ (categorize) your blog/website. If they see unique (original) content when they crawl, they will index the site for the keywords. Then your site is in their index for your keywords. Conversely if they don’t see anything new since the last time they crawled they will just leave without indexing). You slide down in the page ranking. So this is why ‘Fresh’ content is important. It is original and new and it stays on top.
#4 People go to the search engines to find things to research, to buy or to do. In our example it is someone who is thinking about starting a home business and they are not sure exactly the way to go; but they have heard that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to get started. So they go to Google.com and type ‘affiliate marketing’ or ‘home business’.
Google goes to their index and they list all the sites that have content that includes those keyword phrases. The person is directed to visit the site. This is ‘targeted traffic’ – they are interested in what you have to offer so this is more likely to generate a sale for you than just random traffic.