There’s a little bit of confusion as to whether SEO and internet marketing is an art or a science. It is actually more science than art, because there is a systematic way to go about acquiring traffic and generating buzz for a website and product. Only thing required is that a person understands the basics and knows what tools to use.
SEO Basics: Keeping visitors happy and adding more visitors is what SEO is all about. For this purpose, it’s a lot better to be an expert on whatever the website is all about, rather than be some kind of SEO whizkid. Other than that, all that really needs be done is to use the right kind of platform like WordPress for a blog or joomla as a CMS. Make sure to read Google’s webmaster section tips and guidelines for optimization.
Keyword Tools: SEO begins with keywords, so before doing anything else, compile a list of keywords relevant to the website. All future activities, including those outlined below, depend in one way or other on this list. It is therefore imperative to get hold of a nice bunch of keywords with high query volumes that are actively being sought after by competitors.
An expert in SEO will be able to come up with a nice list of keywords without any help. But it works better, and is more scientific, to use a keyword tool. The most popular one is from Google, which generates keyword suggestions for Adwords users. There are many more, though, that work just as well, including Wordstream and SpyFu.
Onsite Optimization: The main part of onsite SEO is about matching pages with specific keywords. It’s important to have the keyword in the page title and the URL. Other than that, it’s best to leave things to flow naturally. Keyword insertions within the content, if any, should never break the flow of the page and its message. It’s always better to leave existing content as is and focus on building new landing pages for each keyword.
Other things that help include using the right platform and/or CMS so that it can automatically produce the required titles, URLs and optimal internal linking structure, which is a good strategy for all Internet marketing practices. Design and back-end scripts can be optimized by using the right fonts and graphics, and a better hosting server that speeds up page loading time.
Link Building: Incoming links are pretty important, as far as search algorithms are concerned. What a link building campaign does is work with the keywords and content creators to acquire targeted links for each page, based on the keyword. The essence of it is to reach out to and establish relationships with like-minded and important website owners. The actual transaction needs a certain amount of experience, so unless the webmaster is aware of terms like three way link deals or sitewide links, it is better to get a professional to do this.
Analytics: Without a good way to analyze traffic, it’s hard to tell whether or not the site is going in the right direction. A good analytics script will offer everything from source referrals to keywords used, landing page data, demographics information about visitors and the time they spend on specific pages. Even more important is the ad clickthru information and conversion data, which highlights pages and ads that are doing well.
To sum it up, SEO and internet marketing does not require a magic wand. There are things that one learns by experience, and others that can be done using tools and scripts. But the bottomline is that it’s still about talent, hard work and a solid product/service.
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