Many people inexperienced in internet marketing wonder why your search engine positioning is important.  As they become more involved online, however, it soon becomes apparent that the difference in cost between free and paid advertising can be considerable.

Let’s look at way to explain this that most people can understand. Let’s assume that you have a national newspaper that offers two types of adverts.  With one you can pay for every time somebody looks at your advert, or even a fixed sum for every thousand people who read that particular newspaper, and with the second you get free advertising if your advert is good enough to attract readers.

In the first case your advert is bound to be seen, but not necessarily by people interested in what you have to offer, and in the second it will only be seen if you construct a good advert offering people exactly what they are seeking.

Probably the former is the better deal, where you pay for each time somebody decides to look at your advert, but unless that advert is highly targeted to exactly the product you are selling, you are likely paying for views that will not lead to sales. However, what would be your response if you were informed that you could have a free advert if the newspaper editors believed that you product was exactly what their readers were looking for?  You would jump at it, and make sure that your advert was designed to attract just these readers.

That is what search engines are offering you, by providing good search engine positioning if you can demonstrate that your web page is just what the user of the search engine is looking for.  If you can do that, you will be listed in the search engine.  However, there are so many other people like you trying to advertise on that search engine, that you have a lot of work to do if you are to persuade that search engine that your page should be positioned higher than the others for any particular topic.

For topic read keyword, and for your advertisement read your web page that is optimized to provide good relevant information about that keyword. You could take the option of using Google Adwords, for example, as a pay per click advertising program or of paying for advertising on ezines (the first option in the second paragraph above), but if you can persuade the search engines that you web page can provide the information needed by the user of that search engine, then you get your advertising free (the second option).

Taking the newspaper example again, a front page advert is far better than one amongst the classifieds in the middle of the paper. That is equivalent of search engine Page 1 listing, and is what all of your competitors are also looking for. However, any free advertising is better than none, and even getting your web pages listed anywhere on a search engine such as Google is going to be of benefit to you.  The search engine positioning, however, will determine how much traffic that listing will provide to you, or in newspaper terms, how many readers will actually read your advert and perhaps respond to it.

Have you ever seen these newspaper ads with a form for you to fill in?  Yes?  Well you get the same online, and you should also provide a form like that.  If somebody clicks on your listing, you want to make sure that you at least get their name and email address so that you can get back to them even if they didn’t stay much longer on your web page than it took to fill in your form.  If you offer them an incentive to fill in the form, then even better, because more people will fill it in to get the incentive, which could be a free ebook, a special report or some free software. Even a regular newsletter attracts people and persuades them to join your email list.

It is all very well being listed in the index of a search engine like Google for a specific search term but it is the position of that listing that is important to you.  Although a Page 1 listing is best, you can also get good results if you are listed on the second page since many people will look two pages deep for the information they are looking for.  Nor is it necessary to be listed at the very top of Page 1, since almost everybody will scan down the page until they see a listing that appears to provide them with the information they are looking for.

Your page title is what generally appears as the heading for the listing, and either your ‘Description’ meta tag or the first few words of your web page will appear under it. Then will come your web page URL.  All of these should be designed to attract somebody seeking the information that you provide, hence the importance of your Title tag that appears right after the HEAD tag and before the BODY of the text.

Whether or not you believe that search engines use your ‘Description’ meta tag, believe me that they do. Word it in such a way that your potential visitors will feel compelled to click to your web page for the information that they are looking for.

Your web page URL should also be carefully chosen.  While the URL itself might not affect your position very much, it does make a difference to human beings.  If you are seeking information on lighthouses, would you rather click to a page entitled ‘/lighthouses.html’ or one with the file name ‘/shipping.html’ (for example).

These are only the minimum requirements for your web page (search engines list individual pages, not complete websites) to be listed in a good position, and there is a lot more needed before you can expect a Page 1 listing.  However, if you want the free advertising that the likes of Google can give you rather than pay for it, then it is important for you to understand why your search engine positioning is important, and how to achieve a sufficiently high listing for you to make best use of that free advertising that a high search engine positioning can provide you with.

The importance of search engine positioning to your ultimate success cannot be overemphasized. It is not just that search engine advertising is free, but also that your position  in one particular search engine can also affect your listing in another.

However, that is a minor benefit compared to the exposure that a high position in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo can provide you with.  A first page position in any search engine is valuable, but in Google it is gold dust. That is because Google is the largest search engine on the planet, and more people use it for information that any other.

Since the first page is the farthest that most people look when looking for information, then a high position is essential. Some will go to the next page, and even fewer to page three, but after that you might as well not be listed. It is estimated that around 20% of searchers will go to the second page and another  5% to the third page.

It is obvious, then, that your search engine positioning must at least be in the first 20 results for it to be worthwhile, although Page 1 would appear to be the holy grail. In making these statements about search engine positions, it should be understood that your pages are listed separately, and that the listing or position is for one keyword or search term only.  Thus, any of your pages can be listed, and for any number of different keywords, although generally one web page receives a high listing for one keyword only.

The question is how do you achieve a Page 1 search engine listing that provides you with all the resultant benefits?  You can do it, but it will take some work.  A high listing position on any search engine does not come cheaply, and Google is especially difficult.  However, if you follow some simple rules you can make it easier, and through time you will achieve that coveted Page 1 listing.

I will not waste time in explaining the simple SEO on-page techniques that you can find on any Google page if you search for them. What you need to get ahead of the pack is advice that will enable you to achieve a large number of links back to your website.  When you read about linking strategies you will likely read that you should try for links to pages deep withing your website.  Nonsense!  You have little chance of deep pages being listed and should expend all of your efforts on the listing of your home page.

It is the home page that is listed the highest of just about all websites, and you should do your best to get that listed with as high a search engine positioning as you can. Ignore all that advice about internal pages:  if your home page gets listed people will visit your internal pages of your site is interesting enough, and that is up to you.

The best way to get that coveted Page 1 position is to write articles. Write as many as you can, submit them to as many article directories as you can and provide a link to your home page on each article.  Write the articles in general terms about your main topic,  so that your home page is regarded as relevant to each article.

However, to be blunt, relevance is irrelevant!  You are not looking for visitors. They might be good to have, but visitors do not get you a high search engine results position.  Links do. In this case links are better than visitors, and believe me, you will get plenty of visitors once you get onto that first page.  All this is contrary to what you might have been advised to date, but each part of your internet marketing campaign must be focused on one end result, not several.

Thus, if your objective in one part of your campaign is to get a high position in the search engines, then forget about visitors and traffic. Concentrate on getting the position.  If the objective is get more traffic, then forget the search engines:  concentrate on what gets you most traffic.  Do not try to kill too many  birds with one stone or you will miss them all.  A bird the bush is worth a dozen in the hand!

If you want a good search engine position don’t spend your time trying to get traffic.  Write your article and use your home page as the link in your resource box.  The content of your article is totally irrelevant, although if your website deals with cats don’t write about dogs. At least pay lip service to the topic.  This is totally impure article marketing, but it gets results.

Always remember when trying to improve your search engine positioning: work to achieve that and nothing else, and ignore anybody who tells you that traffic is more important.  Sure, traffic is important, but so is jelly at a child’s birthday party but you don’t make the jelly while baking the cake. One thing at a time, or you will make a mess of both.

If you know how to use offline advertising for your internet business, you could get a load of customers that you otherwise would not have had.  Not only that, it could bring your online business to the attention of local people that could give you business just because you are local.

Most internet marketers never use the benefits that local advertising can provide them, although those benefits could depend a great deal on the type of business you have.  There are several ways in which you can advertise offline, both locally and nationally, and which you use could depend upon your available budget. Forgetting price for the moment, here are the various options, though I am sure that you could think of others.

Is your product sports or health related?  Or does it relate to some group or club that has local premises?  Why not go to your local sports club or health center and ask for permission to put up a poster advertising your products or services?  Stress that you are helping the club to provide a full range of services, but if they insist on payment, then try it for a while and compare the price with the return.  You should normally be allowed free adverts, especially if you are a member of the club.

Many local stores and shops allow adverts to be placed in the window or door of the shop, or inside on a specially designed rack.  These are normally charged but should be no more than a dollar a week or so.  The great thing about such local adverts is that the population in your town or area get to know your name, and associate you with somebody that can provide something for them should they ever need it.  You can get a phone call weeks or months after placing the advert.  You must include your phone number in your advert in order to gain trust, and make it easy for people to contact you.

Your local press is another excellent way of getting known locally as an expert in your field.  Local press adverts are normally affordable, and you can advertise both your products or services and your website in either the classified adverts section, or even take out a block advert withing the publication itself.

There is also the national press, although you will pay more for these adverts. However, the publicity you get might be well worth it.  If you can afford one initial advert then try it, and decide on your future national offline advertising strategy from that.

Going back to local, how about local radio?  Local radio can be a very fruitful advertising medium and also costs a lot less than you might believe. If you have a good confident speaking voice you can even record your own adverts yourself.  You can keep recording at home till you get it as perfect as you could and then send the CD or MP3 file to the radio company. In fact, you can have it recorded by a relative or a friend and it can be worked upon till it is right.

All the radio station has to do then is to play the MP3 file, or CD, whichever medium they prefer to use, and you get local exposure.  The same is true of national commercial radio, although the more listeners the more you will have to pay.  However, offline advertising need not be restricted to store adverts, newspapers or radio.  How about television?  There are some local commercial TV stations that will broadcast your ad, but for the time being these do not come cheap.  Its worth a though though.

Magazine adverts are very popular, and how often have you come across a magazine advert for money-making ideas that are no longer used online?  They have been demonstrated to be questionable online, and some MLM programs belong to this group that have now gone back to magazine publishing.

That is how many started off, such as some of the earlier Ponzi schemes whereby you send so much money to the person at the top of a given list, and add your name to the bottom. Theoretically OK, until you calculate how many people would have to be involved after only five repetitions involving only twenty letters sent out, and some recommend 100.  That means ten billion participants after 5 repetitions of the letter – don’t make me laugh.

However, we are getting off-track.  You can do well with magazine advertising if such an obviously faulty scheme can. Advertise your own program or business using a magazine, and you are sure to get a load of customers.  The same is true of putting your URL and phone number on the side of your van or car, and using a good signature on all of your correspondence:  make sure that all your letters include your URL and email address after your geographical address.

However, no matter what offline advertising method use, whether it is free to you or very costly, its effectiveness is calculated from whether or not it gives you a profit.  A free advert making you $10 a week is worth less than one costing $1000 that earns $1011 dollars a week.   That is how to use offline advertising for your internet business:  compare expenditure with income, and if the latter exceeds the former, then it works for you.

If you know how to get your emails read, then you will be a step ahead of the majority of your competition because most of them haven’t a clue. The vast majority of emails are never opened, let alone read, and there is a technique that must be used to make sure that your emails are read.

If you are involved in internet marketing, you will know how many emails you get each day – even those that get past the spam blocker.  Nobody ever opens them all, and most simply scan down either the sender or the subject columns.  Some people manage to scan both at once, but you have to assume that the subject line is the most important visible part of the email because there is little you can do about the sender.

This is not quite true, because you can change your email address to include a sexy looking sender’s name, but it is generally the subject line that gets the email opened.  You must design a compelling subject line, and there are some tricks you can do to improve the chances of your email being opened.

First use the recipient’s name. At one time this was guaranteed to get it opened because the recipient believed that the sender must know them personally, but it is just an autoresponder trick using the name provided in the opt-in form.  Most people are used to seeing their name in the subject line these days, but it won’t hurt for you to include it. They might take offense if it is not there!

Your subject line must include a believable benefit or offer to the person receiving the email.  The important word here is ‘believable’.  There is no point have a subject something like:
“John:  Make $10,000 in 24 Hours with this Great New System!”

Nobody will believe you.  Everybody is used to this type of email now, and all they want is your money up front before you are sent an PLR eBook that has been regurgitated a dozen times. The offer must be believable.  Nor can you use spam words such as ‘Free’, ‘Cheap’ or sometimes even ‘Offer’. The ‘$’ or ‘£’ sign is also taboo.  Your email will never be seen, let alone opened.

So what kind of benefit would get past the spam blockers yet still seem compelling enough to get it opened?  How about:
“Ten New Devious Money-Making Tips to Download”

That is OK, and might get the email opened.  It is offering something free without actually using the word, and also possiby slightly ‘illegal’. However, to really get it opened it helps if you know a bit about the recipient’s business. You won’t really know this, but if you have a list of people that have signed up for your SEO newsletter or Ezine, then you are pretty safe using that as your theme.  You might have more success with something along the lines of:
“New Breakthrough SEO Info in Your Mailbox Now”

The important aspect of a subject line is that it should tell the recipient what is in the email, not try to sell them it. Even a simple “ April, 2008 Newsletter” is better than “Make $1000s with this Great Newsletter”.  Studies have indicated a far higher opening rate from the former than the latter type of subject.

So be honest with your subject line and state clearly what is inside it.  If you are offering an ezine or newsletter it helps if you can include a URL in the ‘Sender’ line that tells the receiver ‘who’ is sending the email, and a line in the ‘Subject’ telling them ‘what’ is inside.  Don’t try to sell the contents of the email, just state what is inside, but try to make it a benefit rather than a bland statement.  However, the bland statement has been shown to be more effective that an outrageous offer of high earnings.

So, your email has been opened. Your next task is to get it read, since just as the vast majority of mailings are never opened, so the majority of those opened are closed almost immediately. You have to catch their eye right away with a good headline. Let’s take the “New Breakthrough Seo Info” as an example. Keep in mind that this is an email sent to an SEO list.  If you want your email read, you will need a better headline than:

“Hello John,
I have included some SEO tips in this email that you might be able to use on your website . . . “
That doesn’t do a lot for me, and I am sure it does even less for you.  You have only a couple of seconds after the email has been opened to grab the reader’s attention, so you need a proper headline, not a “Dear John” letter.   How about:

BEAT GOOGLE with FREE BREAKTHROUGH TIPS

That is more likely to catch the eye of somebody interested in SEO.  The fact that you will never beat Google is irrelevant.  It stops them just for that all important second to keep the email open. They are then more likely to read the second line:

LEARN about the BLACK HAT Methods That Bring SUCCESS

You can then ask them to register for your course. This type of approach does not always work because it depends a great deal on the type of readership you have.  However, those interested in SEO want to know the secrets the big dogs are using, and they associate these with black hat methods. Hence the term BLACK HAT is liable to attract immediate attention.

That’s the secret:  grab immediate attention just long enough to stop them closing the email and you have succeeded. Some emails are so well designed that even people paid to open emails and keep them open for 30 seconds have read them and even acted on them.

So the next time you are writing an email,  be truthful with the subject line and use it to tell the recipient what’s inside, then use a catchy or compelling headline in the email itself to keep it open for that all-important first second or two.  The nature of that headline will depend on the topic of the email, and will be specific to each individual mailing. That’s how to get your emails read, not by making impossible offers and writing boring introductions.

Everybody’s top three traffic generation techniques would likely be different, but likely only in respect of the order in which they appeared. The first two here would appear in anybody’s list, although it is how you use them that matters and not the fact that they are used.  These techniques do not include classical SEO because that is not so much one technique as several.

You might wonder why only three, because most people provide five, or even seven.  The reason is that it is these are the three that will provide you with the vast majority of your non-search engine traffic.  There are many others but what they provide is very little in comparison to those mentioned here.

The first is article marketing. Keep in mind that these are traffic generation techniques, and not how to make money techniques.  You won’t make money without the traffic, and it is once you have the traffic that you employ the techniques that actually make the money.

Article marketing generates traffic in at least two ways.  When you write an article and then submit it to an article directory, it will contain what is known as the ‘author’s resource’.  This is strictly intended to provide a short biography of the author, and a link to his or her website.  However, you can also use it as an advertisement for your product or website, and phrase it in such as a way as to compel readers to visit your website.

This is made easy due to you being allowed to include a link to your site in the resource.  You can make a link to any page in your website you like, including a sales several articles every week and send each to dozens of different article directories for masses of traffic. However, it doesn’t stop there.

Readers are allowed to, and frequently do, copy your article as content for their website, as long as they retain the resource intact.  Your link therefore appears on other websites, and visitors to those websites can also make a click to your site. That’s Traffic generation with a capital T. But there’s more!  Each of your articles on each directory provides you with a link back to your website from that directory page, as does each article copied to another website.  That helps your Google PageRank, which can also increase your traffic.

For these reasons, article marketing is my #1 traffic generation technique. My second is blogging. If you have a website you can have a blog (you can have a blog without a website, but this is about website traffic). That blog should provide information on additions to your site, and also about the products you are offering (if any).  It is easy to start up a blog, and if you make at least one post a week you should attract a regular readership.  Make sure it has lots of useful and interesting information.

Each time you add a post to your blog, you should ping it to as many social bookmarking sites as possible.  Sites such as Technorati and del.icio.us can provide you with masses of traffic through your blog.  Include a link to pages of your website on the blog and you will soon find out why that is my #2.

Number three just has to be pay per click search engines.  Immediately people see the term they think of Google Adwords, but that is not the only PPC search engine around. There are many others such as Goclick, Searchfeed and Miva where you can get excellent keywords for only 1 cent each – that’s 100 a dollar.  If you lead the adverts you write using these to your website then, since you only pay for each click that goes to your website, you can get up to 1000 visitors for $10.

What you do with them once they get there is up to you, but you can word your adverts as to be highly targeted to the content of the pages you link them to.  You can even use these search engines to send traffic to your Adsense pages because the clicks can be very inexpensive.

These are my top three traffic generation techniques, and each has been well tried and tested.  If you use each of these you will not be short of traffic to your website, and not only that, but to any page on your website you choose since each enables you to provide a link to a page of your choice. That should take care of the traffic, and now it is up to you make use of it when you have it.

For those who don’t know what back linking is, back linking is having other sites link to your site, and it is probably the best way to get high in the Google rankings.
Back linking is considered essential, by most experts, to build your site’s reputation.
In other words having other sites linking to your site is like having people shouting about your site, saying go there, because there you will find what you are looking for.

Back linking seems to be considered very important by the search engines especially
Google, but from my experience I can say that the others do as well.
Google seems to give PR according to the amount and quality of links back to your site.
I said amount and quality, amount is self explanatory the more links a website has the better, but the quality I think is more important then the amount. You want related links, links from sites that relate to yours, that’s the trick if you want to call it so. And the more important the sites linking to yours, the better it is.
What you should aim for is high rank or authority website, this seems a difficult task but it’s not, there are ways it can be achieved, and if done properly it can bring traffic and success to your website.

Links are valuable resources that contribute to your sites popularity. One way links, or sites that link to you without you linking back to them are the most valuable, but this can be quite expensive, as this sites normally charge for doing that. Another way is the reciprocal links, when they link to you and you link back to them, these are quite easy to get, as any site needs links, and if your site is a good one I don’t see any problem getting back links. All you got to do is contact the site’s owner, and ask them about a reciprocal link, many will probably say no, but you will find many that will agree. There are many places where website owner go to find these reciprocal links, some are free and some you pay a fee. The free ones are normally manual you got to do the work yourself, of putting the link in your site and then asking the other site to link back to you, this is normally done via email. The paid ones normally provide software that helps you speed up the process.

Another way to build back links is to write articles and publish them in the article directories. Writing articles can be a very good way, because the links become one way links, and they can bring a lot of traffic, if they are good articles of course.
To be valuable an’ article must have unique content, not an’ article which is around another thousand or so of websites. And to achieve that you must other write the article yourself, if you know what to write about, or get someone else to do it.
There are place where you can hire a writer, like elance.com or many others you will find
if you search the internet, these places are like a auction, you say how many articles you need on a subject an professional writers will bid for your business, and in this way you can find quite good deals.

What ever way you follow in find links, never go for FFA or link Farms.
These instead of helping it can actually impede your website.

SEO is a way of getting free traffic to your website from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Traffic that eventually turns into cash. Most website owners are doing it themselves and some are wasting a lot of money getting someone else to do it. But simply put, SEO is about on page optimization, back linking, network of sites, and hard work.

Research and testing what you do in your website is what it is all about. And this can be very hard work, if you can do it yourself and have got the time, good for you, otherwise you need Seo Services, and if you hire someone, make sure they know what they are doing before, you hand your cash to them. Don’t go for the ones that promise you miracles, there are no miracles here only hard work and know how. No one can promise you that your site is going to rank number one, if they do run away from them.

Seo Services should provide with pages free of HTML error, in other words should be smooth and quick for the search engines to load, and this is not difficult to do. Then they should do the back linking and submit your site to various directories, and this is more difficult because requires a lot of hard work, and you should care about the content. You can have them to do the content for you, but I would go to a third party if you don’t know how to do it yourself. There are places like eLance.com where you find all sorts of experts to write for you and that content is yours, I must say that you shouldn’t choose a subject where you know nothing about. Choose something that you like and you are very familiar with, and do things properly, you might be surprised at the outcome.

For a page to be ready to be listed in the search engine must be clean, original and focused on one keyword or key phrase. Don’t try to get two pigeons with one stone, a lot of keyword stuffed in the Meta tags don’t work any more. If your pages are clean from errors, contain good original content and there are other websites linking to you, the search engine will come and they might even put them on the first page.

What, do you think, the search engines want?
They want to keep their customers coming back to their site, and in order to achieve that, they have to provide them with what they are looking for, which is, relevant information, relevant to the keywords they typed in the search box. And because the search engines don’t write, if you have the information they will send their customers to you, and that’s is brilliant, isn’t it? Getting on the first page is a very nice present, and it’s worth putting some effort into it.

Tags: Internet Marketing, back link, search engine optimization services, search engines, SEO, SEO company, SEO services

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. What does SEO mean? It is how to prepare your page in a way that the search engines love it. At first this might seams very difficult, as search engines use many factors in ranking sites. These are called algorithms, and can change from time to time. If you try to guess these algorithms you might be there a very long time, but if you follow some simple principles as discussed here you will take a different and better approach to SEO.

Think about what the search engines want:

Unique content.

Your page must be unique not copied from someone else; if you copy, the search engines will know about it. You can check the content of your page by going to copyscape.com. They offer a very good service, with them you can check the content of your page against millions of other webpage, and if you find that you got duplicate content, change it. Uniqueness is very important for the search engines, because they want to give a good service to there customers, they don’t want to send them here and there to the same recycled information.

On page optimization.

Your page must comply with the HTML standards of the w3.org. No html error or warnings if possible. No spelling mistakes. Once you got original content and the html mark up is ok, make sure there are no spelling mistakes. Keywords or key phrases.Optimize the content for a specific keyword or key phrase; if you are talking about SEO make sure that the word SEO appears in the title in the description and a few times in the body of your page. Some people give percentages of keywords for the content of your page, just use your judgement, make it interesting to read pretend that you are speaking to a friend, and explain clearly and easy what your want to say, don’t stuff your page with the keyword, this could work against you.

When you are satisfied with the content of your page, you need to tell the world about it, and there are many way of doing that. You can submit the page in form of an article to the article directories. Submit your website to the search engines. Add a link at the end of your emails. It is and easy way to get some more traffic. Add bookmark facility to your web page. A Tell a Friend form. Add an RSS feed to your website or blog. An easy way of doing this by using a free blog software like Wordpress, which has a rss feature. Submit your website to related directories.
Exchange links with other websites. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain.
Buy an expired domain name related to your site that is already getting traffic and transfer it to your site. Give away business cards with your domain printed on them.Start and affiliate program for your products.

Start a social book marking page in Digg, Delicious etch…Publish your own newsletter. Use an auto responder or email campaign. Purchase links from other sites. Exchange reciprocal links with related websites. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.
Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines. Create an ebook and give it away for free.
Use easy to remember domain names. Submit reviews for books and other products at Amazon.
Get referrals non-competing sites that relate to your page. Create products with resell rights and put a link there. Email your list if you have one.

If you do several of these techniques and strategies, the SEO of your page will improve enormously