Internet Marketing Through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Whether you’ve been around Internet Marketing for ages or you’re just starting out, one thing you’ll be certain to come across is the importance of Search Engine Optimization for Internet Marketing. We’re going to cover below an overview of internet marketing through search engine optimization in which we’ll cover the key points of SEO so that your website can be found online by your customers and potential customers.

But what is SEO? Well, Wikipedia describes it at a high-level as “the process of improving ranking in search engine results”. It goes on into more detail by describing SEO as “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”

When it comes to Internet Marketing, your aim as website owner is to use SEO to get your website’s pages higher up the search results with a higher page rank. The higher up the search engine results pages, the better. And, of course, your real target is to get your site on page one of the search results.

Most folks know that sites show up in the search engine results depending on how close they matched the search terms you used. The closer your site is to the search term, the higher the search engines will rank it and the higher up the list of results it will appear.

Now, the importance of your site being near the top is obvious when you think about how many times you’ve ever gone past page one or page two of the search results. So, you should easily see that your number one goal should be to get your site listed on page one of the results, and preferably near to the top of that page!

So, how exactly do you get that all important page rank for your site? Well, let’s take Google as our basis. It allocates page rank based on a number of factors, all of which are used to work out how relevant your site is to Google’s users. Google is only interested in providing value for its users – the people who are searching – and it does this by presenting them with the most relevant sites to their searches.

But how does Google determine this relevance or value? Well, one of the key things Google has always used is the number of backlinks to a site. Backlinks are the links coming into your site from other sites. Google sees these as ‘votes’ for your site from independent people. Another way of looking at this is, the more visits you have from a link on another site, the more Google thinks that the page on your site must be important.

And, get this, if Google thinks the site linking to you is important (i.e., it has a higher pagerank) then the more you will benefit from that link. This is often called passing ‘link-juice’ to your site. The result is that your pagerank will go up.

Google is by far the most dominant of the search engines. It’s even become a generic word for searching (we often say that we’ll just “Google-it” to find something online). Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The core of this is the ‘information’ or, as we call it in internet marketing, ‘content’. Fresh, accurate content is the lifeblood for Google and it’s how it truly values a website.

Google wants to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible and you can help it by doing three key things:

1. Provide clear, simple, original information which is relevant to what someone would be searching for and which is of value to that person

2. Make sure that the relevant keywords being searched for are in the title and heading of your website page

3. Place keywords within the content of your webpage, with the main one(s) being in the first and last paragraph but don’t go over the top with this. Use related words naturally throughout your webpage as Google expects to see words associated with your main keywords and will score you better if it finds them. Overuse of your main keywords will seem like spam and Google doesn’t like that!

So, let’s quickly review our approach to internet marketing through search engine optimization. Your main objective of using search engine optimization in your internet marketing efforts is to generate high levels of relevant traffic to your website. Not just any old visitors but qualified visitors who are looking for what you’re providing.

Page Rank is one of the rating mechanisms by which you can move your site up the search engine rankings, with the aim of getting onto the first page of the search results. This will generate increased levels of traffic and, hopefully, increased business for you!

‘Content is king’ or so the saying goes; and it’s certainly true for search engine results. Provide fresh, relevant, high quality, useful content for your visitors which other sites will link to, and watch your rankings (and earnings) soar!