Have you been trying with little or no success to get people to visit your website? Take heart because you’re not alone. Thousands of websites are created daily globally, but few of these ever get to be viewed by web users. The secret to unlocking the doors of web traffic often lies with mastering the art of search engine optimization; properly done, SEO can greatly improve your search engine ranking resulting to the positive consequence of increased traffic.

SEO is not magic and can be easily mastered by anyone with a deep desire to learn, neither does it involve tricks or hacks. SEO is all about designing your website with consideration to what search engines deem important and providing useful content to end users. Below are five steps to implementing SEO.

Step 1. Keyword Selection

SEO requires that you select keywords or key phrases that properly describes your page content. Your web content should consist of three things namely:

The phrase or keyword should consist of the essence of your web copy. If your web content is about dog food, then an example target phrase could be “Dog food” and not just “Dog”.

Accuracy of keywords; many people make the mistake of choosing keywords based on their phonetic similarity to other words such as “sheep” for “ship” and optimise with these matches which often results to no-ranking.

Popularity of target keyword

A good example is the point number 3 above ; if your web copy is about “Dog food” for example, you can’t optimize using “Dog chow” because people hardly search using the term.

There are various free search engine optimization tools that you can use to locate proper targeted phrases and key words. Some are:

Google Keyword Tool: This is a great tool that you can use when brainstorming for keywoord phrases.

Overture by Yahoo: a great tool for keyword brainstorming and popularity assessment.

Word Tracker: a great tool for competitive analysis and popularity assessment of targeted keywords.

Step 2. competitive intelligence

The second crucial step in SEO is competitive intelligence, to learn who your competition is. SEO work is mostly focussed on individual pages within a website. This means that you may end up locating other sites selling similar products with phrase like “Dog food”, just keep in mind that your competition could be more specialised. Use Google and Yahoo to find out what comes up when you search using your target key phrase.

Step 3. Write your web copy

Search engine optimization is not all about meta tags. Take the following focused approach to search engine optimization:

* Include your target phrase twice in the meta title tag and ensure that the title is “clickable”.

* Add the target phrase twice in the meta description.

* Add the target phrase in the meta keywords.

* Add the target phrase in the title or headline for your page.

Step 4. Promote Your Site

Make sure that when you announce your page, you use your target phrase in both the link text and any explanatory text.

Step 5. Check Your Results and Modify

If the major search engines don’t craw your site on time them submit your site URL to them.

In 2010 we are learning as search engine marketers that we need to be very, very versatile. Gone are the days of optimizing a few title tags, inserting keyword spam, then all of a sudden you find yourself on the first page of the search engines. Today now more than ever you must use all aspects of online marketing in order to get your sites to the top.
Some strategies that have been successful during the early part of 2010:

• SEO
• Local Search (PPC)
• Social Media
• Local Business Directory

SEO – Still one of the most talked about and mis-understood forms on online marketing. Search engine optimization continues to be a strong driver for many sites that are working closely with a consultant, company, or in house SEO expert. With the new social media sites that seem to pop up weekly, SEO specialists have to stay on top of their game in order to keep up with all of the work.

Today, still good unique content and quality links seem to matter the most. Many companies get a nice website designed but forget to focus on the content of the site. Visitors to the site are going to read your content so the way you layout the content and what you say is very important. For competitive keywords, if you are not getting links then you are not going to rank in the top 3 on the first page, period.

Local Search (PPC) – Probably the easiest form of online marketing but also the hardest to get right. Anyone can sign up for a Google AdWords account but if you do not setup the account properly you will be throwing money away to the masses. Along with SEO, PPC requires skill, research, analysis, and correct implementation in order to get the best results.

Social Media – The old everyone is doing it philosophy. Yeah it seems that everyone has a Facebook fan page/business page and a twitter account. The biggest thing the masses don’t understand is at the end of the day it is about having a conversation. In order to get good results within the Social Media realm you must be able to communicate with your followers/fans and get them to react as well as communicate back.

Local Business Directory – Great tool for local businesses. Get listed, verify your listing, and complete your profile. Much like a LinkedIn profile is reviewed by potential employers, your business listing within a Local Business Directory is reviewed by potential customers. You would not want someone to come into your brick and mortar store without providing them with the best contact information upfront.

Social Bookmarking sites are extremely fast and easy to join and they can prove to be an extremely useful tool in helping you to spread the word about your business interests and any other content that you have written that is connected to those interests.

Not all bookmarks that you ad will be found by other people and not all of the ones that are found will be bookmarked or highlighted as favourites by other people either but nevertheless, every entry still has the potential power to generate traffic and the search facilities within each bookmarking site will give you a chance of showing up in the results each time a keyword or phrase that you have used is searched for.Although it can vary from site to site, you will normally have the ability to include a title, short description and string of relevant tags for your entry. The title should be short and straight to the point. These can be factual or simply intriguing in order to draw the reader’s attention and the description should pique the interest of the visitor to encourage them to read further. Whatever way you put it all together, think of it as performing the in the same way as a resource box at the foot of an article. You want to get as many people as possible to click through to your product or service by using your link.

However you put it together, your intention is purely to get as many people as possible to click through to your website or the website of your vendor to buy the product or service that you are currently promoting. If they click though and they like what it is you have to show them, they are likely to show their appreciation by bookmarking the site themselves. This will give you a naturally generated increase in ranking within the bookmarking site for that item with the possibility that it will be seen by more and more people.

Tags are essentially the same thing as keywords. You need to ensure that you tag every entry with as many relevant and strong keywords as you can, because they will all increase your entry’s chances of being found by other people. There are a number of free online keyword tool sites which will help you to discover which keywords will be the most effective in marketing your particular product or service online.

Some sites limit the amount of tags you may use so just make sure to make use of whatever space you have without repeating yourself. Submit your pages to as many social bookmarking sites as you possibly can find. This will ensure that your chances of being found online increase each day and it helps to create backlinks from other sites to your own. Backlinks are extremely important to generate traffic to your site and helps your search engine rankings climb higher, so do all that you can to bookmark as many pages with as many sites as possible.

SEO (search engine optimization) keywords are the backbone of every highly successful marketing venture. The number one goal of every SEO sexpert is to gain the highest quality of return on their investment (or that of their client’s ).

Accomplishing this begins with developing a keyword strategy. This article will sexplain in easy to understand terms the four simple steps that go into creating and implementing a solid SEO keyword strategy. The four steps are:

• Brainstorming keywords: The first step is to get out a sheet of paper and write down as many keywords that you can think of that may be relevant to the main topic of your website. It may help to imagine a potential visitor with a challenge that your website can help solve. Unfortunately, this person does not know about you or your site. Ask yourself what keywords this potential visitor might place in the search box. This will help to give you some ideas for the best keywords. Remember… the search engines bring up web pages that are the best match for the web surfers search term.
• Core term keywords: Don’t let this fancy word stump you. Core term keywords are the keywords that the content of your subtopic is built around. In this second step, you will be narrowing down your keyword list. Cross out any keywords that are irrelevant to your websites focus. Keep the keywords that best describe the content on your site. The most general keywords will be on your home page. The subtopic pages you build off of the main page will contain your core term keywords.
• Keyword clusters: Once you have a tighter list of keywords then you will begin to create keyword clusters by grouping some of your keywords together.
• Map out your website using your chosen clusters: Your home page will have the most general keyword and your other pages will be keywords based on the subtopics of your main topic.

To make this a bit easier to understand, imagine you are building a website on Baseball Sports. Your main page will be your main topic..Baseball Sports / Sports Baseball may be possible keywords you will use. Your secondary pages (those that you will have listed on your menu) may be something like:

Core Term Keywords for the Main Keyword Baseball Sports:

A. Baseball Shoes
B. Baseball Bat
C. Baseball Bat bag
D. Baseball Costumes

Your keyword clusters will be subtopics under each subtopic and may or may not be listed on the menu but will be considered your internal web pages.

Here is an example of the website layout to help give you a better idea.

Baseball Sports (main keyword)

A. Baseball Shoes (keyword core term)

1. Low Baseball Cleats
2. Baseball Cleat
3. Mid Baseball Cleats

The keywords above are called keyword clusters. The bottom line here is that you want the content of your website to be tightly focused on your chosen topic and keywords relevant to that topic. Always keep in mind that your writing for two audiences, the search engines and the visitors who come to your site.

SEO can seem pretty confusing – and it seems that many in the game like to keep it that way. Since starting on the track of SEO Copywriting just over six months ago, I’ve learnt a whole lot from SEO gurus Reload Media & SEO Copywriter Glenn Murray. From lists, headings, bold text & captions, to tricks to check you’re on track; here are some of the top tips I’ve picked up along the way.Wordle is a nifty website that can help you see your web copy much the way that Google sees it. It will show you by way of a word cloud visual which words in your copy are the most frequently used. All you need to do is enter your text into the box and hit ‘Go’.Considering we are a web design agency, and they are among our most prominent words in the image – we can see we’re on track with our copy – letting Google know what our site is about, whilst still (and most importantly) making perfect sense to humans.

Secondly, it’s important to target one keyword per page, or group of pages. As a web design agency in Brisbane, we would of course target web design – but what about everything else we offer? SEO Copywriting, Email Marketing, Domains & Hosting, Internet Strategy and Updates & Support (to name a few!) also need to be optimised.

The great thing about that is – if a page is about SEO copywriting, it makes sense that you’ll be using that phrase a whole lot anyway!

When it comes to the actual copywriting, here are some hints, using the way both humans and Google read & understand copy as a starting point.

HEADINGS:

Humans love headings – it helps us decide what it is we’re reading about very quickly, without having to take in the whole body of text. Google recognises that & so it rates headings as one of the most important factors in deciding what a page is about. So, the moral of the story?

Optimise your headings! BUT – make sure you don’t just use your keywords out of context, headings should be totally indicative of that section. Your readers come first!

An example of this is: SEO Copywriting – Making Sense To Humans & Google
Read: Keywords – Context

LISTS:

Another device that helps readers make sense of large bodies of information is the trusty list. They’re great for:

- Scanning over & getting a quick summary,
- Persuading the reader of the key points; and
- Optimising your copy – again, Google knows people like lists, so Google likes them too.
- If possible, limit your bullet points, lists lose their value if they go on & on. Also, the closer your keywords are to the bullet point, the better.

BOLD:

People use bold words as hooks. And yet again, Google has taken its cue from the way a human visitor acts – bold words are important to us so bold words are important to Google. Glenn Murray points out though – what is important to the customer might be different to what’s important to a reader looking for benefits. So it’s important to strike a balance.

LINKS:

When linking to other pages, Google assumes that the first two words of the link are really important & indicate what the page you’re linking to will be about. It will assume that what you’re linking to is relevant to the content you’re covering too.

The thing is, if you really want your audience to follow the link (& find it helpful & in turn, find your page helpful) then engagement should come first. A ‘read how’ start to a link might be better than keywords in the long run.

CAPTIONS:

Used to describe images, captions are mostly redundant to the human eye. BUT – Google can’t understand imagery, so captions are a very important way for Google to figure out what you’re on about. With that in mind, ALWAYS start captions with keywords.

VARIANTS:

Google is smart enough to know that if your page is about SEO copywriting, your page will also use stems or variants of that phrase. It will pick up on lots of different combinations so you can mix your keyword phrases up as much as you can creatively manage whilst still making sense. You can also break your phrase up with grammar.

For example: Need help understanding SEO? Copywriting tips from leaders in the field….

That said, keep the words in the phrase right next to each other where possible, they’re much more effective that way.

When it comes to SEO, word count is important. Here’s a rough guide to what you should be aiming for in your copy, courtesy of Glenn Murray.

100-150 words for a homepage – it’s important for most valuable information to be “above the fold” (in view without needing to scroll down), 250-500 words for pages lower in the site hierarchy – this might include product or service pages or “about us” pages; and 300-1000 words for blog posts.

And lastly, true to being a copywriter – Murray reminds his readers that it’s all about the benefits to the reader. So, to get people to read your site you need an effective headline and description for your Google listing.

Your description meta tag isn’t used for ranking – so think of it as ad copy and don’t bother trying to optimise. But your heading? It’s of utmost importance.

The four criteria for a successful headline:

Spark personal interest,
Offer a quick, easy way,
Share some news; and
Incite curiosity

These SEO techniques go through a three-phase process. They are bookmarking, article writing, then targeting higher PR sites.The first step you want to do is to set up a blog that you can post new content on. Then afterwards you social bookmark the URLs to the different articles you created. Next you’ll want to take the RSS feed and submit that to different directories and aggregators.Once you finish these steps, the main part of you website will have anywhere from 10 to 15 links. Depending on the competition you’re dealing with, you should be on page 2 or 1 for the particular keyword you are targeting. When you promote a brand new website you need to think long term and just doing the things in the first phase is not enough to give you a significant ranking over the long haul. It won’t sustain your ranking either.

Now you’re going to want to move to what I call phase 2 of the link building activities that you will be undertaking. In this stage, you’ll be obtaining low to moderate links going back to your website. This is where you’ll be focusing on blog networks and article directory networks. There are tools you can use to speed up the automation process.

In this phase you’re giving yourself the potential of acquiring a few hundred links that will go back to your website.

Some of the automated services allow you to put links in the article itself. For those that do I’ll always put a primary link going back to my main website, but some I’ll link to a network of sites that I created using my Web 2.0 properties.

In the long run you want at least 50% of the links to go back to your main website. You’ll want to keep up a good routine of writing articles to submit to either the blog or article networks.

There are good tools that will monitor your ranking relative to your keywords. At this point you should have a few hundred links going back to your website which will be anywhere between 0 to 2 PR rankings. I’ve never gotten anything higher than that.

Now you’re ready to go on to phase 3. In this step you want to hand pick authority sites where you can work in a link back to your website. Some of these SEO techniques used in phase 3 you might have to pay for, but the link back to your website will be well worth the money spent.

Now that you’ve learned how to use these SEO techniques make sure to take the time to set up quality links when you bookmark. Write articles that draw the reader in and offer something to other authority website with a higher PR ranking to get those back links.