This month begins a series of articles to help you benefit from Search Engine Optimizaton for your website.

Tom Bruein

Understanding Search Engine Optimization Almost all of my clients have a website, and wisely, they want to get a better return on the investment of time and money it represents. In the next few issues of the Crimson Sheet, I’m going to provide an overview of how you can develop more traffic to your website. And not just more visitors, but better targeted traffic, people who are actually in the market for what you provide.

3 Ways to Create Traffic
There are 3 primary ways to develop more traffic to your site:
(1) traditional marketing methods,
(2) paid online placement, and
(3) search engine optimization (SEO).

I’m going to focus on SEO for two reasons: it is the most frequently misunderstood option and it offers an excellent and long lasting return on the effort invested. Let’s quickly mention the first two types of marketing.

Traditional Methods
By traditional marketing methods I mean “offline” efforts that direct people to your site, such as advertising, direct mail, and all of your personal efforts such as speaking, networking and referrals. These should be part of any businesses marketing strategy, and there are plenty of resources to teach you how to do these well.

Pay to Play
Paid online placement goes by a number of names: “pay per click (PPC)”, “pay for placement”, and “pay for inclusion”. First of all, if you’ve ever used Google or Yahoo or MSN to search for something, you recognize there are two types of listings that are shown. Most of what fills the page are the “natural” search results. You will also see “paid” listings at the top or along the side. These are PPC ads and are often labeled as “sponsored” links.

An example of this is the Google Adwords program. To be included in the sponsored links section you would specify what search terms you want your ad to appear next to, and set a monthly budget. Whenever someone clicks on your listing you are charged a small fee. It’s a great way to develop immediate, targeted traffic. But when your budget is used up, you stop appearing. If you no longer want to keep paying, your traffic dwindles to a trickle.

The other challenge with PPC you may already recognize. When you do a search, which of those two types do you tend to click on, the natural results or the sponsored links? If you avoid the paid ads, you’re not alone. Research shows that search engine users prefer natural search results over paid listings 5 clicks to 1. (Marketing Sherpa, 2005).

So how do you get into the “natural” listings? That’s where SEO comes in!

SEO Defined
Search Engine Optimization is the art of making your site attractive to search engines so that you rank highly in the natural search results. I say “art” because to succeed, your website must not only appeal to the search engines so you are visible, but it must appeal to readers when they click through to your site. It’s not always easy to accomplish both.

How is Ranking Determined?
To remain popular, Google and Yahoo must deliver search results that are relevant to what the public is seeking. They do this through increasingly complex algorithms. Most of the complexity involves trying to keep shady marketers from cheating the system and beating the search engines at their own game. But for us honest folks, at the core of it are 3 main factors:

Relevance: the occurrence of key words on your pages that are relevant to a search request.

Prominence: where the keywords appear on your pages – higher on the page, and in titles, bolding, italics, page names, links, and descriptions.

Importance: the number of sites that link to your site. Search engines assume that if your content is important enough for other websites to reference, then it’s important enough for them to put towards the top of their search results. Think of this as a global popularity contest. Extra weight is given if the site that points to you is:

• Also relevant to your content, i.e., you’re both in the same industry or cover similar topics;
• Linking exclusively to you on the page, rather than burying you in a long list of links; and
• A site that is also popular.

How do you know if a site is popular or important? One simple way is to download the Google toolbar and then whenever you are visiting a site it will display Google’s ranking of that site, between 0 and 10.

In the next few issues I will explore these three main factors in detail. But I’ll give you a tip to get you started: The one factor that you have the most control over and can start to impact immediately is “importance”. You can begin today to cultivate inbound links to you site.

The best way I know of for a small business owner to do this is to begin using your expertise to write and distribute meaningful articles about topics in your field. By making your articles freely available to web publishers, each time your article is placed somewhere for readers to see, your short bio at the bottom of the article will point back to your website. You not only become a more widely recognized authority in your field, but it helps build your website’s popularity ranking.

For more details on placing articles, visit the Sharp Editing resources page for more free information.

Now more than ever you should consider sharing your ideas and knowledge with the world!