Stacy Kinney

In last week’s article, Search Engine Marketing – An Internet Marketing Strategy that Needs to Be in Your Toolbox, I talked about why your internet marketing strategy should include search engine marketing.

Between newspapers, education, business websites, personal blogs, social networking, and online magazines, the amount of information available on the internet continues to grow exponentially. Users turn to search engines to sift through it all and find the information they need to solve a problem they have. Search engine marketing is all about making sure your site gets listed within the first few pages of the search engine result for keywords that bring qualified prospects to your business.

Search enging marketing is a great way to increase website traffic.

Make no mistake, search engine marketing is complicated endeavor. In fact, a whole million dollar industry sprang up around the concept of optimizing web pages so that they rank well in the big three search engines. However, I’m going to share a few simple search engine marketing tips that will give your website the boost it needs to rank well and generate leads.

Choose Your Keywords Carefully – Keywords are the foundation of your search engine marketing strategy. So to say it is important that you choose the correct keywords to target is an understatement. You are going to have to do some research here and find out the keywords your customers are using to source the products, services, and information you are selling. Luckily there are several tools online that can help with that.

- Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool will tell you how many times a specific keyword, and variations of that keyword, have been used for in all of the search engines.

- Google’s Keyword Tool will generate a list of keywords based on a starting word you input.

Keyword research is an art in and of itself which we will cover more in-depth in a later article.

Optimize Your Web Pages for Your Chosen Keywords – It is important that the search engines associate your website with the keywords you have picked out. Therefore, for your search engine marketing to be effective they need to show up in the right places on your web pages.

- The title of your articles should include the keyword, preferable within the first 4-5 words and you should use your keyword within the first few and last sentences of your article.

- The keyword should be sprinkled liberally throughout the written content on the page. You want to shoot for a keyword density of 2-3% but definitely no more than 5-7% of the total amount of words on the page. Over usage of keywords can get your website flagged as spam and kicked out of the search results.

- Video and audio need an accompanying text description. Search engines can’t parse video or audio so you need to add keyword rich descriptive text that tells the search engine what it’s all about.

- Images should contain keywords in the alt tags. Not only does this allow your images to get ranked in image search engines but it helps impaired users understand what the image is about. Special browser read the image text and tells the user that there is an image and what it is.

- The categories and tags you use should be keyword rich.

- The description meta tag of both your website and individual web pages should include a keyword rich narrative of what the user will find when they click through to your website. Search engines use this description on the search result pages.

Build a Portfolio of Keyword Rich Backlinks – Offsite optimization is just as important to search engine marketing as onsite optimization. When you or other people link back to your website, you want to make sure they use keyword rich anchor text. This also helps the search engine associate your web page with your targeted keyword.

For example, if you are using search engine marketing to rank high for the keyword ‘home based business’, you want to make sure that when your website is referenced that the keyword ‘home based business’ is used when linking to you. Search engines interpret these types of links as a vote that your website or web page is the best source of information on that particular topic.

This is, by no means, is an exhaustive tutorial on search engine marketing. However, using these tips will get you going in the right direction towards dominating the search engines. For more tips and information on using search engine marketing to grab prospects and explode sales, visit RockYourBusinessOnline.com.

(image credit: Edgeworks Limited)

Other Posts You Might Like:

1. Search Engine Marketing – An Internet Marketing Strategy That Needs to Be in Your Toolbox
2. Video Marketing – Making the Most of Your YouTube Channel
3. Social Media Marketing – Using Social Media to Increase Website Traffic
4. Twitter Marketing – The Real Secret to Amassing Twitter Followers
5. Twitter Etiquette & List of Recommended Tools