Monday, September 28, 2009

SEO Elements

By Anne Torres

Basic SEO is not hard, it is a methodic and logical approach to your Market. Let's get this straight. SEO rankings is really about understanding your market, your competitors and ultimately your visitors. A little bit of discovery will go a long way in successfully commanding your market.

Before we get into the 5 elements of SEO, we need to examine the the discovery side of your business.

1. Understand your market. Is there really an on-line buying market? You can have thousands of searches monthly with very few buyers. Is your product or service conducive to marketing on the Internet? Example: I ran across a market not long ago that I thought had some potential. "Tattoo Design". Many thousands of searches each month with relatively few competitors.

So I found an affiliate program and set-up some PPC ads. After several hundred dollars in clicks and 1 measly sale, I stumbled into a forum that was talking about tattoos. What I discovered was that people weren't going to pay for designs because they can get them at the tattoo shop for free and that the only potential customers I had were the actual Artists themselves. This reduced my market to a fraction of what I thought it was. I failed to understand the market.

2. Understand your main Competitors. Choose battles you can win! Who is competing for your keywords is a fundamental requirement of effective SEO. If your website is new, avoid chasing keywords that you cannot rank well for. You are spinning your wheels if you believe you can go up against competitors that have Page Ranking of 5 and up. Not impossible but it will take a lot of work and time.

3. Understand your visitors. This is the toughest one of them all. Since most visitors only stay on a site for 15 to 30 seconds it is hard to determine what they like or dislike. You can discover clues to what they want by visiting forums and absorbing the posts. Emphasizing the problems or situations is an effective way to create website stickiness. So what does this have to do with SEO rankings?

Quite a lot actually. You see if you have a pretty good grasp on the 3 items above your SEO efforts will be much easier and the results will be greatly improved. OK, on to the 5 Elements of good SEO.

These are loosely listed in the order they should be worked on. I say loosely because each element is an ongoing process and all elements are of equal importance. This means for example, that you need to add content and continue to work on backlinks simultaneously etc.

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