How to Use SEO to Your Advantage

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fancy term for a very simple concept – getting high rankings in the internet search engines to gain lots of free targeted traffic from them. It’s a very important internet marketing strategy. Utilizing keywords in your website content is one of the first steps for getting high rankings in the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. However, improper use of SEO terms can actually have a damaging effect on your website’s ranking on these search engines. Here are some tips to keep in mind…

Have Valuable Content

Search engines prefer to pick up content that has been written by a human instead of being pre-generated by a computer. You want to write content that not only contains the proper keywords, but also contains actual value for your readers. This not only gets the visitors to your website to stay longer, but it also gets you a higher ranking in search engine listings.

You don’t want to overdo it with SEO terms either. Every page on your website should stick to one general topic so that you can plan out two or three keyword phrases that would best describe the topic. Look at the most frequently used search terms for your topic in order to get the best possible SEO keywords to use in your content. Having multiple web pages with various related keyword phrases for each can help you to spread your presence on search engines and help your visitors find the information they are looking for.

Links and Title Tags

Often, people tend to forget about the other areas of a website that can have an effect on their rankings. The words you use when creating a link are often picked up by search engines as being keywords for your site. Use your SEO keywords in links to improve your search engine rank. Linking to other parts of your site can also improve your overall traffic.

The title at the top of a website is known as the title tag for that page. Adding keywords to your title tag is another good way to optimize your website for search engines. Your title tags will double as a description of your website for search engine listings, so you want to make sure they contain the best keywords and a solid explanation of the page’s content.

Know Your Visitors

Web sites receive visits from people from all around the world, which is why seo writers need to utilize multiple keyword phrases to get the best search engine results. Not every person searches for something using the same vocabulary. You must know who your target market is so that you can better plan your SEO keywords to target the demographic. Using social tools like polls, forums and other interactive venues can help you get feedback from your audience as well as provide entertainment that will keep them coming back after their initial visit.

You can often use programs to track your site visitors in order to see which days you have the most traffic, which search terms have the most hits and where most of your website’s visitors are coming from. By using this data, you can plan your content accordingly to achieve the best results possible.

SEO keywords can help you to attract more visitors to your website via the most popular search engines. The trick to using them is to have valuable content and to insert two to three keyword phrases naturally in to every web page. Links and tags also have an effect on your rankings, so be aware of how you use them. It is important to learn about the people who are visiting your website and plan your SEO content accordingly.

This is a guest post written by Corry Cummings. He is the owner of Content Customs — A content creation company that specializes in high quality web content writing services.

Posted in SEO

Using Web 2.0 Sites in Your Link Building Strategy

A basic definition of a “web 2.0 site” is as a website that is not static and allows users to interact with each other as well as contribute to the website’s content instead of passively viewing the information. Some examples include; social bookmarking sites, social networking sites, web based communities, wikis, blogs, video sharing sites, and more.

These Web 2.0 sites offer great opportunities to use them as part of your link building strategy for your own website or blog. It’s well known in the internet marketing world that building links to your site will help with your search engine rankings and bring you a lot more traffic. It’s also no secret that you should diversify your backlinks instead of using just one or two strategies. That’s where these web 2.0 properties can come into play.

There are virtually endless ways to use these sites to help boost the rankings of your own site, and below are a few good ideas to get you started:

1) Squidoo Lenses

Squidoo.com is a very popular place for sharing information through the creation of mini-sites called “lenses” and it is one of the most popular web 2.0 sites. A lens is a one-page website on a specific topic. On that page you can add relevant articles, embed videos, photos, products, and all sorts of other things. Of course, you can also post links back to your own website or blog.

They don’t allow all topics so check to be sure your topic is allowed before you get too far into creating a lens. If it is, create as many lenses as you like, each of them sharing good information along with links back to your website and/or blog.

2) Hubpages

Hubpages.com is another extremely popular web 2.0 site that allows you to create one-page websites but they are called “hubs” instead of lenses, and they aren’t as flexible as Squidoo. Hubpages requires you to use 100% unique content – you can’t use previously published articles or PLR content. What you can do is rewrite your articles so they are basically brand new, or pay a writer to do it for you if you don’t have the time. You are allowed to put links back to your own sites but do it in moderation.

3) Blogs

You might already have a blog but there are many different blogging platforms where you can create more of them to use in your link building efforts. Blogs are typically considered to be web 2.0 properties and you can use them for creating plenty of backlinks to your main website/blog. Some free platforms you can use are wordpress.com, blogger.com, livejournal.com, blog.com, xanga.com, and many others. The most common approach for this type of web 2.0 property is to regularly keep adding fresh content, and have relevant links leading back to your own website or main blog.

Private label rights (PLR) content also works well to help keep these blogs active. You can either modify the content to make it more unique, or simply use it as-is. But I do recommend re-writing it at least a little bit. If the content includes keyword phrases that go along with your topic, turn them into anchor text and link them back to your main sites.

You can also use free reprint articles by other people. Simply go to an article directory like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, or articlecity.com and pick a few articles that go along with your topic. Post one or more articles a day, including a link back to your site in the post. Be sure to keep the original author’s bio box with a live link to their site – you aren’t trying to steal the content, only use it to keep your blogs active, which is perfectly fine.

Okay, now you have 3 ways to use web 2.0 sites in your link building strategy. Start with those above and then expand into some of the countless other web 2.0 properties that are out there just waiting for you to use them.

Posted in SEO