5 Ways To Use SEO In Your Online Marketing

By Corey Graham 2.0 

Search engine optimization is not an exact science. Google the big giant in search described it as half art, half science. Once you appreciate this you can have fun with SEO in your online marketing, rather than utter frustration.

Let’s imagine you are searching for a particular email. We all know how frustrating this experience can be. Let’s imagine you received an SEO proposal in email and a few days afterwards you need to look back at this proposal. Sometimes it’s easy you to find, and other times its like looking for a needle in a hay stack, especially when you are trying to find it in a hurry. Breathe for a minute, I totally understand. I have been there too.

Usually the problem is that the emails are not “optimised” for the terms you are searching for. You might be searching for “Proposal for SEO” when the title of the email might be something as simple as “Online Marketing Quote” or something like “Here it is”. Worse yet it could have been attached to a long email thread with a subject lin totally unrelated. E.G. 'Are you Going To This Marketing Strategy Conference'. You would never find this email using the search term “Proposal for SEO” because the email does not contain any of those keywords.

This is pretty much how it is on the web also. Your potential customers might be going to one of the popular search engines typing in a search term that actually does not appear on your website! That's just scary when you think of it.

Ideally you want to be landing on the #1 spot for relevant searches. You want that everyone who wants your services sees your site come up as the #1 result.

Find the Right Keywords

You need to figure out which words your potential customers / clients are using when searching for product or service that you offer.  It’s important to note that some keywords are more popular than others and have lots of competition on them. As you will see in tip #5 its might be smarter to take your fight to get to the top to those keywords that are not the most popular but have good search volume and competition on them.

You can figure out these words by using the google keyword research tool, asking your customers, clients and friends what they search for when looking for a service like the one you offer. Your site analytics should also give you a clear indication of which keywords are bringing people to your site.
The key thing is to narrow it down to about 3- 5 words your potential customers are searching for.

Once you know your keywords you can get busy posting content to your website that would come up when people search for these keywords. Its important to make sure you mention the particular keyword about 6 times in the articles.

Search engines give sites which are regularly updated a high search ranking because its most likely that the site is well managed and has the freshest content

Submit Your Website To Search Engines

The top search engines allow you to submit your website directly to them. So instead of waiting for them to come and index your site, you can connect directly to them and tell them when new stuff is on your site. In return they give you a few interesting stats that can be helpful as you aim to make your site more search friendly.

Go do a search for the term and look at the sites that are performing well. Take sometime and see what they are doing that is different to you.

SEO specialist rate this as one of the top things to do to get your site rated highly. Search engines place alot of emphasis on how many sites are linking to your website / content. The thinking is that people will post / share links on their site to great content. These links are called backlinks, the more “backlinks” your site has then the better for you! Remember some of the most popular keywords might be 'owned' by sites which have 15 years of backlinks!

I will remind you again that these things are not quite set in stone the web is a dynamic environment with changes daily. Every once in a while some major ground breaking changes that really shakes up things. At the moment the SEO world is waiting to see how Google's latest announcement "Google Instant" will change the face of SEO.