Internet Marketing SEO

Internet marketing SEO 101:
How to get a top ranking in the search engines

Without a doubt, Internet marketing SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the most important online strategies you can learn.

If people can't find your site, how can they buy your product, find out about your service, or learn more about your business?

The bottom line is if you have an online business, you need to be using SEO for Internet marketing.

There are an absolute TON of things you can do to get the search engines to sit up and take notice of your site. Here are some of the SEO essentials:

• Optimize your site for your top keywords. Show the search engine spiders what your site's all about. Include your top keywords where they'll be noticed most: in your title and description meta tags, your domain name if possible, and in your image alt tags. You should also include your keywords in your site content, especially the first and last paragraphs.
  
  
• Create a sitemap of your site. A sitemap creates a trail for the search engine spiders to follow from one page of your site to the others. Make sure you link all the pages of your website back to your homepage, and place a link to your sitemap at the bottom of every page.
  
  Don't want to spend a lot of time building a sitemap? Use Google's Sitemap Generator.
  
  
• Build relevant link-backs to your site. Getting relevant sites to link back to yours is critical to achieving a high search engine ranking. It tells Google how popular (ie., useful to their searchers) your site is. The key is to get linkbacks from complementary, high PageRank sites.
  
  Listing your site in these top Web directories will give you a great start: Open Directory Project and the Yahoo directory.

All of the above Internet marketing SEO strategies are geared toward optimizing your site for the organic (aka FREE) search engines. But if you're in a real hurry to get traffic to your site, consider pay-per-click advertising (PPC).

PPC is the fastest way to get traffic to your site. You write ads tailored to each of your keywords, and when someone searches on that keyword, your ad shows up in the sponsored listings of the search results. You pay a pre-determined amount every time someone clicks on your ad.

To get started with PPC, visit:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo Search Marketing
• MSN Live

If you take the time to optimize your site now, you'll be richly rewarded with a top ranking down the road. Or you can get the rewards of immediate exposure and traffic if you invest a bit of money with PPC advertising now.

Want to learn more about using SEO for Internet marketing? Check out our online archive of free newsletters for many more Internet marketing SEO strategies.