Thursday, August 19, 2010

Basics Of SEO And Internet Marketing

By Adriana Noton

Some people call SEO and Internet marketing an art, but it is more of a science. There's a precise way to go about building traffic and buzz for a website, and it works. All that needs be done is to understand and find out how it works, and what things to do or not to do.

SEO Basics: SEO is more about a better visitor experience, and figuring out ways to attract new visitors. From this viewpoint, it needs one to be an expert in a specific sector or field that the site caters to, rather than an SEO expert. All that really needs to be done is to be aware of the Google guidelines outlined in its webmaster section, and use a suitable platform like Wordpress for a blog or joomla for a site that needs a robust CMS.

Keyword Tools: The first thing that any SEO campaign needs is a list of relevant keywords to work with. Everything that comes after that is based on one of the keywords in the list, so it is of utmost importance to do this the right way. The best keywords are those which have high query volumes and are being consistently bid on by the site's potential competitors.

An expert in SEO will be able to come up with a nice list of keywords without any help. But it works better, and is more scientific, to use a keyword tool. The most popular one is from Google, which generates keyword suggestions for Adwords users. There are many more, though, that work just as well, including Wordstream and SpyFu.

Onsite Optimization: The main part of onsite SEO is about matching pages with specific keywords. It's important to have the keyword in the page title and the URL. Other than that, it's best to leave things to flow naturally. Keyword insertions within the content, if any, should never break the flow of the page and its message. It's always better to leave existing content as is and focus on building new landing pages for each keyword.

Using the right CMS and/or blog platform helps for including the keywords in all the right places, not to mention the ease of creating an internal linking structure with a good hierarchy, which is a good strategy for all Internet marketing practices. Design modification to enlarge fonts and optimize graphics can help the user experience and page loading speed. So does tweaking back-end scripts and shifting to a more powerful web server.

Link Building: Search algorithms give a lot of importance to incoming links to a page and website. A link building campaign's main task is to find and establish relations with relevant and important websites. Unless the webmaster is aware of how to work out three-way link deals and sitewide link partnerships, it's best that a link building campaign be managed by a professional.

Analytics: Very important to have powerful analytics that can take raw logs and offer comprehensive analytical data. This includes keywords, referring source, landing pages, time spent, visitor demographics and clickthru data for banner and text ads. This data is what tells webmasters what is working and what visitors seem to like more. Provides room for doing more of what works and shows which sections need improvement.

To summarize, there is no deep, dark secret behind SEO and internet marketing. Yes, there are tools and software that make life easier, and some tricks of the trade that can help the site grow faster. But the core of it is to have a good product/service to offer visitors, and lots of talent and hard work.

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