Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101

For those of you in the States, I hope you are having a fun
and relaxing Memorial Day weekend, and also taking time out
to remember our fallen heroes.

This week I wanted to continue our ongoing discussion about
the biggest mistakes businesses make with their web sites.
This week we focus on search engine optimization.

It amazes me how people will spend outlandish sums of money
without implementing basic search engine optimization
strategies. It's like building a store in the dessert and
hoping people will find you in a sandstorm. It doesn't
work.

The most frequent lament I hear from prospects and clients
is that they have invested in a web site but they have no
traffic.

Now there are many ways to optimize a site and many tactics
you can employ to help you achieve prominence in the search
engines. Some of these are known as white hat tactics
(legal, good) and black hat tactics (illegal, bad). Black
hat tactics tend to try to exploit weaknesses in search
engines, but these only work for a short time. I only
suggest white hat tactics or you risk getting banned.

What kinds of things can help you to optimize your site?
First, check your META tags. View the source code for your
home page and look for these types of META tags towards the
top of your web page code:

meta name="keywords" content="authors, writers,
publishers, publish my book, self publishing, book
publishing, ebooks, ebook publishing, ebook publisher, how
to sell books, self publisher"

meta name="description" content="Get published instantly
with EbookoMatic."

These tags are from site EbookoMatic.com. Note how the
keywords reflect the nature of my site content and use
phrases that I believe likely prospects would use to find
my site in the search engines. The same for the description
tag. Without these simple tags, my site would be invisible
to the search engines. If your site is missing these two
tags, then you need to start employing them on every web
page.

How do you choose the most relevant words? Look at your
competitors' sites, view their source code, and start
compiling a list of words they are using. Then adopt that
list for your own site. Here's a good tool for this:

Pay Per Click Web Spy
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/utilities/ppcwebspy.htm

Secondly, your site must contain relevant information, and
the deeper and wider that content, the more relevant your
site will be to the search engines. So if your site is about
Siberian Huskies, then your page content should reflect that
topics in as many pages as possible. Here's a great tool to
help you to search for and compile info for your site:

Instant Article Wizard
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/utilities/instantarticlewizard.htm

Thirdly, write a press release about your site and submit
it to the search engines. Make sure to use lots of keywords
in your press release, and wherever possible, link those
keywords to your site. Be sure to include references to your
site's URL (domain name) in the press release.

Where and how do you submit these press releases? While you
can research this and do it yourself, the best thing to do
is to purchase a press release submission tool. These tools
tend to come with a list of press release distribution sites
and will enable you to submit your releases in an automated
or semi-automated fashion. They save a great deal of time.
Submitting articles is a good method, too. I recommend:

Press Equalizer
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/business/pressequalizer.htm

Instant Article Submitter
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/business/instantarticlesubmitter.htm

Auto Submit Article Machine
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/utilities/autosubmitarticlemachine.htm

Article Submitter
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/utilities/article%20submitter.htm

The more press releases you can publish -- I recommend
monthly -- the more back-links you will receive back to
your site. Since many of these press release distribution
sites have significant PR ratings from Google, your site's
popularity ranking will grow in Google, eventually giving
you a better organic position in the search engines.

Another thing you need to pay attention to is localized
advertising in the search engines using Google's AdWords.
If you have a substantial budget and know what you are
doing, you can achieve a lot of traffic and sales this way.
The best book about this topic is this one:

Authority AdWords Secrets Revealed
http://www.searchengineassistance.com/authority/

If you don't have a big budget, then you can use another
service which makes the whole keyword bidding process very
turnkey and hands-off but still generates good local
traffic. It's called LocalAdLink and can only be purchased
through a LocalAdLink Brand Builder like me. You can read
more about the service here:

LocalAdLink
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/services/localadlink.htm

I am using this service for several of my clients. The
Clubhouse Bar & Grille shows up locally in Tulsa whenever
someone searches for "bar" or "restaurant". If you want to
achieve prominence in your own backyard, then this could be
what you need -- very localized and very targeted down to
the zip code. Contact me for more information.

There's tons more to search engine optimization. Too much
to cover in this single email, but hopefully this gives you
some things to think about.

Until next time

Steven