By Guest Author

SEO is just like a live wire to the survival of websites created for profit reasons. This is because there would not be any relevant activity in any website that doesn’t attract traffic. Though attracting traffic isn’t ultimate because if such traffic isn’t targeted, it would be very useful to the site and the webmaster. The best way of attracting relevant and targeted traffic to any website is by the proper application of search engine optimization tricks and tips. This is because the website visitors that will come from these search engines are actually those that are searching for your kind of product or services. It is always a very good start for any webmaster that will be SEO conscious even from the moment he or she decides to register a new domain name for another website.

Keywords are the most potent tiny tools that will derive lots of traffic to your site if they are well used and appropriately positioned. While you can do a good guess work and come up with keywords you think may be popular, it is best for you to invest in some simply keywords research tools online. These keywords research tools will eliminate any form of guess work whatever from you keywords picks. They will provide you with the exact keywords that are being used by those who are looking for what you will be offering on your site.

These keyword research tools aren’t quite expensive and most of them attract only a one time payment but it will be worth every dollar you spent on it. Another dimension to it is that there are currently some keywords research tools such as Google Keyword Research Tools that are absolutely free. Their performance and the results they show have been reported to be extremely effective in tracking the relevant keywords in any particular niche. 
 
We dwelled so much on the keywords for some serious reasons. These keywords when properly sprinkled within the articles and write up you publish in your website will go a long way in attracting search engines to scan through you site. The effect of this can not be underestimated.

The next important step to be taken while creating an SEO-friendly website is to have a well crafted sitemap on the homepage of your site. This will help the search engines to easily access the pages of your site through the homepage. When many pages in you site are indexed, crawled and ranked by several search engines, the result will positively reflect on the rank your site will enjoy in these search engines. This simple but potent SEO-friendly step is noticeably ignored by many webmaster.

Another point worth mentioning here is that some webmasters learn few SEO tricks and stay with them whether they are getting the right results or not. You have to be flexible in your SEO-friendly approach. Be dynamic while creating your site and don’t hesitate to learn and apply newer tips because a simple SEO change you make may just be all you site needs to explode.

By Mike Moran

I speak to many small eCommerce businesses working on organic search marketing. They usually understand the concept of keyword research, but often they miss a basic step that makes the difference between a successful search program and one that just bumps along without creating much of an impact.

Sure, they follow the basic steps. They analyze their logs to see which words are bringing the most traffic, the better to optimize for them. If they are smart, they analyze which keywords bring the most conversions, not just the most traffic. They understand the priorities and they use them to improve their Web site to drive even more traffic with those keywords. Great job, right?

Well, not exactly.

It’s good as far as it goes, but there is a big missing step that can make a big difference in organic search success. You must also think about the keywords that aren’t bringing any traffic to your site right now.

For large sites, this is less of an issue. Larger sites get so much traffic that almost any keyword shows up in the referral list somewhere. But for small sites, that’s not true. For small sites, it’s easy for a referral list to miss important keywords.

What can you do to find these hidden keywords?

• Check your competitors. You might be missing these keywords, but someone is getting them. See what words your competitors use on their sites and see if you are missing some of them on yours.

• Brainstorm outside your team. Get a perspective from your customers and others who are less familiar with your offerings. They might use words to describe your products that you don’t.

• Expand your buying cycle. Too often, we focus only on the later parts of the buying cycle. We focus on product names and model numbers and all the words people use when they are near purchase, but we forget the words people use at the outset of the cycle. Often we have no information on our sites about the problems our products solve-keywords about the problems are often overlooked.
If you’ve been focusing only on the keywords that already bring you traffic, think about whether there might be keywords that you’re completely missing. Finding just a few of those hidden keywords might provide you the boost your organic search program has been missing.

Why is Google so Valuable?
Have you ever wondered why Google is worth over a hundred billions of dollars? Or why a single click from Google can go for as high as $50? The reason is the precise targeting offered by search engine marketing.

How Most Advertising is Broken
Most ads try to club you over the head and beat you into submission. Search engine marketing is a completely different form of advertising because rather than trying to tell you what to do, the searcher requests to see the ads and views them as relevant to their wants, needs, and goals. Advertisers bid to show up where they are relevant – when they are irrelevant. If they bid for irrelevant keywords they lose money on every click.

2 Approaches to Marketing
Ads on websites with no targeting can have little to no value. Search traffic, which is laser targeted, is worth over 30x as much.

For display advertising, Credit Suisse estimated that in 2009 the average CPM will be $2.39, down from $2.46 in 2008.
…
As for paid search, JPMorgan projected that for every 1,000 searches, $75.33 would be generated from ads in 2009.
Would you rather hunt for customers, or make yourself available to customers hunting for you? SEO allows you to tap the value of search, with your customers finding your business when they need your products & services!

Research the Market Value of Any Keyword
The cool thing about search engine marketing is not only is it so targeted, but it benefits search engines to share valuable keywords with prospective advertisers. This means you get to spy on the relative search volumes of different keywords, and how much your competitors are willing to pay for keywords.

Using the Google Traffic Estimator Sandbox you can view how much Google’s estimate the of keyword value at

Notice how there are 3 different listings for each keyword. They are based on Google’s AdWords ad match types, and can be used to help you know the relative search volumes between different types of searches.

1.[credit card] represents searchers who searched specifically for the keyword credit card with no other modifiers in it.
2.”credit card” represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for a keyword that contained credit card in it, including people who search for keywords like best credit card.
3.credit card represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for any keyword that contained the words credit and card somewhere in their search string, including people who search for obscure keywords like payment card without any credit.
Enter some of your keywords here and see what Google thinks they are worth.
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

1.list down 5 important keywords to your business
2.enter in all 3 match types for your keyword
3.pick your language & markets
4.do not enter a bid price (this way Google assumes you are willing to pay the market rate)
5.hit enter & get your results
The above tool estimates the value of traffic to a single paid Google AdWords ad, but most searchers click on the free search results, so the keyword value to your business may even be higher than estimated by the above tool.

Tomorrow we cover other useful keyword tools as well as the keyword research and discovery process.

Cheers,

Aaron Wall

By Aaron Wall

Online Marketing is Complex – One thing I believe about online marketing (and SEO in particular) is that the more rigid the advice the lower its value, particularly when it is cast out to a general audience. Why? Online marketing incorporates psychology, sociology, game theory, etc. The human mind is complex. Understanding how many of them work together (or against each other) is even more complex.

There are hundreds or thousands of ways to win a market. Each idea is a tool that has potential risks and potential rewards on a per market and per project basis.

Link Building in 2003

With link buying people get emotional and just consider it out of the question. Back when I got started as an SEO, many SEOs were considered spammers simply because they even did any link building at all. Why?

• It was amazingly effective.

• It was time consuming and expensive work that many established SEOs did not want to do for their clients.
Since then the web graph has got amazingly polluted and paid links are treated similarly to how link building efforts were treated back then.

Few SEO Tips Are Universal

Rand recently stated that he no longer recommends paid links. If you philosophically didn’t believe in buying links then why would you spend $1,000,000+ building a web graph of link data? What good is researching all the link data if you take link buying off the table as one of the options? Most of the competing links that you can replicate will require some level of payment.

Sure link buying does not make sense for everyone, but it makes a lot of sense for some businesses. And if you don’t buy links then there is little purpose to link research tools, IMHO.

The potential risks & ROI in link buying are not the same for everyone. Saying link buying is off the table is like saying keyword research is off the table. Sure if you are TechCrunch you don’t need to do keyword research to succeed, but it still wouldn’t hurt to consider it.

Waiting in Obscurity is a Real Cost

Let’s say that you are starting a brand new project and have 0 market momentum – a position almost every successful webmaster starts from at some point in time. I don’t think there is risk in buying a few links because you have to start from somewhere. Most of the people who launched new websites in the past year will be out of it by the end of next year. The biggest online risk for new webmasters is perpetual obscurity.

While being obscure you are not…

• building brand and momentum

• building cashflow

• building customer loyalty

• optimizing conversion flows

• catching up with established competitors who are re-investing into growing their businesses

By Brickmarketing

When you get ready to actively market your business online more than likely your first stop will be with search engine optimization (SEO).  The most important ingredient to search engine optimization will be properly conducted keyword research for your website. Keyword research alone could make or break your online game,,.
If not done properly you could be missing out on very valuable keywords. If you do not take your time you could put keywords on pages that don’t belong or target keyword in your pay per click campaign that do nothing but produce clicks and burn through your marketing and advertising budget. When conducting keyword research there are some things you should be looking out for.

1.    What Niche do you want to be In? You will have to find out what type of group you want to be visible to and get inside their shoes in order to figure out what types of keywords will fit best on your website. Really find out and isolate what type of products you are servicing and find all the niche keywords and phrases that revolve around that niche. Don’t always worry about targeting all the high volume keywords because they receive the most traffic. Long tail keyword phrases often times convert the best when it comes to SEO and PPC. The long tail phrases are usually conducted by web users who know exactly what they are looking for.

2.    Budget: Budget meaning how much of a marketing budget do you have to go after competitive keywords? If you are a one person company starting out you will need to bring some heavy ammo to go after the same keywords that your competition that might have been around for 5-10 years and is established is going after. It is important to not only target the very competitive keywords but also the keywords that have medium amounts of traffic and also low. You have to remember that SEO is long term and you won’t be visible over night.

3.    Competition: Take a long hard look at your competition to see what it is that they are targeting. It is always important to take a look at what your competitors are targeting for keywords on their website when you starting conducting your keyword research. You know what they say; the best offense is a good defense. It is always important to know what types of keywords your competition is going after so you can gauge just how much of an effort you will need to put out there in order get into the same area.

So… What does an SEO Consultant really do?

The SEO Consultant must start with understanding the clients’ business and marketing goals to develop the strategy and approach for a winning SEO campaign.

Ideally, the SEO Consultant should understand things like: Business Objectives, Marketing Strategies, Demographics of Target Audience, Media Mix & Flight Dates, Creative considerations, Messaging, Success Metrics, Dependencies, and Methods of Measurement.

Then, the SEO Consultant starts the process of leveraging the client’s strategic marketing and messaging information (industry segment, target market, value proposition or offer, etc.) for keyword selection and creative development.

Here is a summarized task list for the SEO Consultant.

1) Understanding Client’s Business Objectives & Strategic Marketing Plan
2) Comprehensive Website Analysis
3) Keyword Research and Analysis.
4) Baseline report
5) Competitive analysis for main keywords/keyword phrases in Search Engines.
6) Content Analysis & SEO Copywriting
7) Analysis of information architecture and linking structure.
 Analysis of HTML and page layout.
9) HTML validation.
10) Recommendations for necessary modifications to essential page text elements for achieving satisfactory search engine placement.
11) Recommendations to optimize source code including the URL, filenames, page titles, descriptions, javascript, etc.
12) Search Engine Saturation / Link Popularity Analysis
13) Link Relevancy & Co-Citation Analysis
14) Internal & External Linking Strategy & Recommendation.
15) Ongoing Monthly monitoring, reporting and recommendations.
16) Continually optimize according to the client’s needs and business objectives
Below is an SEO Proposal that I’ve used in the past:

SEO Process, Deliverables, and Pricing

The following provides details on our 9-Step SEO process, along with pricing. Our 9-step SEO Process ensures that we provide a thorough and comprehensive analysis and recommendation.

Step 1: Identify initial webpages for SEO: We will identify and optimize the most important pages on your web property first.

Step 2: Identify the main and alternate keywords for each web page: Identifying the right keyword phrase that will drive results is critical for successful SEO. Our findings show that in many cases, a phrase is better than single word, especially in an online competitive situation.

Step 3: Interim Client Approval: Review the webpage’s and keywords with you to obtain agreement or make adjustments before beginning the actual SEO analysis and recommendations.

Step 4: Baseline Reporting: Generate a baseline report for the primary & secondary keywords. The baseline, as the name implies, gives us an indication of where your pages are ranked on the leading search engines, and will be used to measure results.

Step 5: Critical element analysis: We provide a deep analysis on the key elements that, when adjusted & optimized, leads to an overall successful SEO campaign.

Step 6: Recommendations: Leveraging the analysis performed in Step 5, we create a comprehensive document that addresses specific changes and additions for your site. In some cases we include sample copy and the exact HTML code, suitable for cut & paste by your programming team. Further, we will explain in detail each of these attributes and include industry standards. We will review this document with you in detail and address any questions.

Step 7: Programming: The actual implementation of our detailed recommendations. Once all the changes have been completed, we will run an audit to verify that the recommendation was implemented correctly and identify any changes, if needed.

Step 8: Submission to Search Engines & Web Directories: Although search channels regularly spider new & existing pages, we recommend submitting pages to the key channels. We will, as part of the recommendation, identify the key search channels where we should submit your webpage’s, and any fee associated with each. (Eg: Google Sitemaps, BOTW, etc.)

Step 9: Monitoring and Optimizing: SEO takes patience and continuous monitoring and optimizing to achieve success – more so in a highly competitive keyword segment. We will provide monthly reporting and optimization recommendations. The reporting is compared to the baseline (or previous month’s results) to identify trends and help guide additional adjustments.

Optional SEO services include:
1) Writing Press Releases that are optimized for Search.
2) SEO Copywriting Service

If you want to get someone’s attention you have to know more about those that will be looking. It does you no good to bring dinner to a dessert social!

Once you know who’s eye’s you’ll be turning your way, the next step is to really hone in on the type of content that they will want. In the world of movies, it’s not hard to generate a male audience. Show a little T&A, add some guns and explosions and you’ve got a movie almost any guy will watch.

But the world isn’t made up of only men. This something that Hollywood understands when it comes to selling TV advertising. There are the 18-49 year old male demographic, but there are also teenage boys, tween girls, older women, older men, etc. Each one of these segments has their eye on something completely different.

In the online blogging world, there is also a while range of audiences. You know who your audience is, but what are they looking for? The easiest way to figure this out is to perform a bit of keyword research. When looking for things to talk about you need to look at three different keyword categories:

Broad Topics

If you have a good handle on your audience, coming up with topics should be relatively easy. Of course this assumes you have more than a superficial knowledge of your audience, but you’re there in the trenches with them. In our illustration above we used keyword topics representative of a motorcycle battery site. If you want to write for an audience interested in learning more about motorcycle batteries you need to understand what topics they might be interested in.

Obviously the audience wants to know about batteries, but what other battery related topics might they want to read about? Some might want to know more about how to keep their batteries charged during the motorcycle off-season. Others will be interested in maintaining the life of the battery. More than a few might also be interested in various kinds of battery chargers. These are just a few broad topics that can be used to create good blog fodder.

Specific Desires

Next you want to research keywords that highlight any specific desires they might have regarding those topics. Some visitors will want information specific to Honda batteries while others will want battery information relevant for their Suzuki bike. You will find at some point your audience wants to know about different types of chargers such as solar, maintenance free or trickle chargers. And yet again, there may be more specific concerns regarding off-season storage ideas.

The key here is to let the keyword research help you find the terminology that your audience uses. You can write an article on battery maintenance and another on battery storage, and still another on battery care. Three different approaches to what is essentially the same topic, yet each blog post addresses the distinct terminology used by your visitors and can cover a different set of thoughts and ideas.

Immediate Concerns

Going beyond your reader’s desires, you can tap into some more immediate or urgent concerns. These can be found by looking at more specific phrases that show up in the keyword research. You’ll often see these in the form of “how to” type questions.

These questions can cover a wide range of sub topics using a variety of “long-tail” search phrases. This is really where you can get into creating dozens upon dozens of articles addressing all the various concerns that your audience might have.

In most industries there are no shortage of concerns that can be written about. Any question can turn into a valuable blog post. Any thought can be expanded on to provide your audience with new information, or at least new ideas to consider.

Any good keyword research tool will help you uncover the search patterns of your audience and provide you with dozens and even hundreds of search phrases that you can then use in your blog posts. Providing your audience with the type of content they want to see is essential to growing a blog that is well-read and respected in your topical community. Of course you have to write authoritatively on your topic but that’s another issue all together.

Posted by Mark Simmons, SEO Resume.

This is a guest post by Mark Simmons, a seasoned SEM, SEO, SMM professional and freelance consultant based in Raleigh, NC. As managing partner of marCis Interactive Consulting, Mark specializes in creating comprehensive online marketing strategies and providing highly-effective campaign management services. He can be reached at mark@marcisconsulting.com for more info.

Often times, marketers overlook the importance of a campaign?s keywords in favor of catchy creative, fancy testing techniques or their reliance on bid management software to sort it all out. Now, I?m not saying that these individual components are not important. Everything plays a role in the success of a campaign. However, keywords make up the fundamental basis of a strong campaign.

Keywords are vital because they indicate user intent. We can determine if the consumer is in the research phase looking for general information, looking for a specific product or brand and when they are ready to make a purchase. Using this information, we can effectively group the keywords into relevant categories in order to creative appropriate (and timely) ads, improving our chances of creating a positive user experience.

All too often, inexperienced markets will take a quantity over quality approach. Judging a campaign by the large number of keywords it contains does not indicate its potential for success. On the contrary, smaller, highly-targeted sets of keywords are the best way to control spend and drive ROI. Once best performers are identified, you can experiment with variations of these keywords instead of making random guesses. Keywords can also be used to beef up your other marketing channels. Successful PPC keywords can be used as content in email, mobile or banner creative.

A successful SEM campaign makes use of many tools and strategies. Start with solid keyword research and add some intuitive thought to get into the mind of your potential customer. You?ll find that using this approach from the beginning can lessen the learning curve and speed up your path to a positive ROI.

Source: http://www.allthingssem.com/keyword-and-the-sem-campaign/

Last week in this space, I urged organic search marketers to focus on optimizing for one keyword per page, rather than taking a scatter shot approach where they are trying to shoehorn many keywords into the same landing page. I knew that it wasn’t the normal advice that people hear, but I wasn’t prepared for how many comments and questions I got, so I thought it was worth revisiting the topic this week. If you’re still unpersuaded about the approach of targeting one keyword per page, I want to take another shot at it.

I got lots of questions about this stark advice, most along the lines of, “Yeah, but can’t I target several keywords effectively with the same page?” The short answer is that you can, but I can’t guarantee how successful you’ll be.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you own a shoe store in Sheboygan, where you feature expensive women’s fashion shoes. You could decide that you want your home page to come up when your customers search for “women’s fashion shoes in Sheboygan” and I bet you’d have a good chance of your site coming up high in the rankings. And maybe you’d also get high rankings for “shoe store In Sheboygan.” And maybe “women’s shoes in Sheboygan.”

It could happen. And it’s just fine. But most people that I talk to think that they can also get rankings on that page for “women’s shoes”–you won’t. Or even “women’s fashion shoes”–fat chance. Or worse, they think that you can stuff in “women’s sandals” and “high heels” and you think you’ll be able to squeeze all those terms onto the page and just keep optimizing the hell out of the page and it will all come up roses.

I think it’s the wrong approach. I am not saying that you won’t have pages that will rank well for multiple keywords. You will. But you are better off shooting for one keyword for page and getting lucky than thinking you can target five different keywords on a page–you’ll probably end up with a page about nothing.

Now understand, I am not telling you that you have to avoid using other keywords on the page. You don’t. Write naturally. Write to persuade people. Make sure that you use the keyword you are looking to optimize but don’t avoid other words that naturally crop up. But, I advise, make one keyword the primary focus of the page.

Lots of smart people disagree with me. Jill Whalen, a copywriting expert, offered a comment disagreeing vehemently. And it’s fine with me that she can target 3-5 keywords per page and it works. I’m not giving her advice–she doesn’t need it.

I’m giving advice to the average person out there. I run across far more people who try to target many keywords on a page and fail than people who target one keyword and fail. It’s that simple. Professionals like Jill understand which kinds of keywords are related to each other and can be combined on the same page. Most people don’t and get themselves into more trouble by doing so.

Feel free to try it the other way. I won’t be upset. But when people ask me for advice, I find that they end up doing the right thing more often when they try for one keyword on a page rather than three or five. And they are pleasantly surprised when the page ranks for multiple keywords rather than upset when it ranks for none.

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn’t hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are my latest and greatest tips to get you started:

1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to. The search engines put a lot of stock in how long your website and domain have been around. While you can purchase a new domain and redirect your old one to the new one, your best bet is to use your existing domain/website if at all possible. If you’re redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect at least somewhat of a loss in search engine traffic. It could be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months or more.
2. Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their little search box. If those “someones” are typing in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimize your site to meet *their* needs. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide demographic information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.
3. Research your keyword phrases extensively. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tool. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation,” as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about.
4. Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research. Your research may uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For instance, let’s say your site sells toys. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the toys they’re looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child’s stage of development? (Look for keyword phrases such as “preschool toys.”) Or are they more likely to be seeking specific brands of toys? Most likely, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in many different ways. Your job is to make sure that your site’s navigation showcases the various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific age ranges, specific types of toys, etc.
5. Program your site to be “crawler-friendly.” The search engines can’t fill out forms, can’t search your site, can’t read JavaScript links and menus, and can’t interpret graphics and Flash. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use these things on your site; you most certainly can! However, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to choose a category or a brand of something, the search engine crawlers will never find those resulting pages. You’ll need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you’ll need to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages. (Please note that HTML links do NOT have to be text-only links. There’s nothing wrong with graphical image navigation that is wrapped in standard <a href> tags, as the search engines can follow image links just fine.)
6. Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (aka alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (aka the anchor text) to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Don’t make them guess what’s at the other end with links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.
7. Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market’s needs, and make sure it’s copy that the search engines can “see.” This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. (This is where that target audience analysis comes in handy!) Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn’t going to cut it, and it just looks silly. (Purchase and read our Copywriting Combo for exact tips on how to implement this correctly.)
8. Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique Title tag. Title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with every search engine. Whatever keyword phrases you’ve written your copy around should also be used in your Title tag. Remember that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it’s on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff.
9. Make sure your site is “link-worthy.” Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site’s overall link popularity. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without your even asking. It’s fine to trade links; just make sure you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of related sites. When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.
10. Don’t be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings. If you’ve done the above 9 things correctly, you will start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. (You can sign up for a Google Analytics for free, which easily tracks and measures those things that truly matter.) It certainly won’t hurt to add new content to your site if it will really make your site more useful, but don’t simply add a load of fluff just for the sake of adding something. It really is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your products. Neither your site visitors nor the engines really give a hoot!