SEO Primer

The objective of this tutorial is to educate and update webmasters and website builders with search engine optimization techniques. The ultimate objective of all webmasters and web developers is to get a good Google page rank. This tutorial will help achieving this objective by explaining and implementing SEO techniques. The techniques explained in this tutorial are the most comprehensive and efficient. The aim of this tutirial is to help webmasters and web developers do their own search engine marketing using these techniques in the best possible way.

This tutorial is logically organized page by page and each page deals with a specific topic concerning SEO. The pages are arranged in such a way that the flow is exactly like the process flow of SEO implementation. This in itself is a guide to what is to be done after what in SEO implementation.

This tutor assumes that there is a plan to build a website and it needs to be optimized using SEO techniques. However, complicated issues like flash and frames are covered towards the end of the tutorial. These complications are best handled by SEO experts than the users themselves. Our sincere hope is that the webmasters and developers going through this tutorial would enjoy the process of SEO and put it to good use. All the Best,

SEO begins with building your website. It is important to understand and implement a few SEO techniques while you are still building your website, instead of waiting for it to finish and start editing it again. Once you are thorough with planning your website complete with blueprints, SEO implementation begins by segregating your website into two different and distinct criteria – On-Page and Off-Page. Both these criteria are equally important from SEO point of view and no partiality is to be shown. On-Page criteria are those that one can see on the webpage. They are Title, Headings, Meta Tags, Content, Keyword etc. This will be elaborated at a later stage. Off-Page criteria are links coming to and going from your webpage. They include anchor text, reference tags and attributes. You will learn these in detail at alter stage. The Off-page criteria are weighed and analyzed by Google page rank. So the importance of off-page content is not less then that of the On-Page.

Step by Step approach to building an Optimized Website Embarking upon building a website is preceded by some necessary ground work which will help plan the site properly and as per the target audience. Your website will showcase your products and services, so you are in the best position to know what will be the basic persona of a target visitor. A target visitor is a visitor who visits your site with a genuine intent of buying, difficult to visualize, putting it in SEO terms a targeted visitor is the visitor who has a very high chance of buying your products or services. So when you plan your website do not get into techniques of high traffic generation or using hot terms. Instead, build it using targeted terms and an objective to attract targeted traffic. This is getting a little too complicated, let me explain.. High traffic is of no importance if none of the traffic converts, but targeted traffic is bound to have a good rate of conversion. High traffic is not going to generate high sales; it will certainly generate higher bills due to bandwidth.

Optimizing your site for your products, services and brands only, do not generalize. The fine balance between your product descriptions and general ones in the industry should be maintained or your site could end up generating traffic to you competition. Similarly hot terms means the industry jargon that you use in daily life everyday, you don't expect your customer to understand that, do you? Targeted terms are terms used for the industry generally. So knowing your target audience is of prime importance.

The Holy Trinity of SEO - Three factors to Success

With the SERPs (search engine results pages) being the new High Street - you didn't think it would be easy to achieve height in the rankings did you? Settle your mind - the easy days are gone - they weren't much good anyway. Only geeks bought from the web a few years ago. Now it's essential to be on the web for most companies because only now is when people buy services and goods through the medium. See TurnerDow for the full 27 methods to optimise your company in it's online incarnation, covering PPC, SEM and SEO. Most of these are cyberspace common sense, not doing them will incur potential penalties. Assuming these are all OK - here is the holy trinity of search engine optimisation.

The Father. Title Tags

This is the easy one - though completing it should be preceded by signifcant pondering. It's promotional but you need to make it nice for search engines too. It's the heading that will appear in the SERPs when your site gets returned in it's listings. Work hard on it. Look at how succesful sites (those returned highly for phrases you'd also like to be returned highly for) use the tag noting the anatomy. Just a few words, but an essential part of the seo success trinity.

The Son. Make a Great Site

If you build it they'll come. Take xe.com the currency conversion site. It's one of the most popular sites in the world. YouTube, Alibaba, MySpace, About and many more. These sites are places people want to come, they don't need links but get them anyway. If you have yet another laptop sales site, you have your work cut out - but if you have figured out a way for people to get cheaper diesel for their cars, are you going to need to request links? Nope. Somewhere in between these extremes is your site. Realistically it isn't likely to be in either category - but be sure to make your site fully featured but intuitive, simple but useful, a good visitor experience - and your work of getting back links is much easier. If the site is one of many cookie-cutter sites, well, why should anyone link to it? What's the point? But if they get there and they see something others would like to see - something they enjoy - they'll link in time, even if you have to request it. Natural links will come too, something the search engines will see and like.

The Holy Ghost. External Links

You saw this one coming huh? You were hoping there was some way around gettng backlinks, but knew in your heart that it had to be there. One could almost invoke the estate agents mantra: Location, Location, Location, replacing it of course with Backlinks, Backlinks, Backlinks. But the other two points of the sacred triangle have to be present too. Getting backlinks is the webmasters curse. It's so effective because it's so difficult - the search engines know that other sites get link requests continually and unless there is some reason not to, junk them. Carry out the second in this list well and the task will be much easier. If your site is good, they will link. Well allright - with a little encouragement from you. How to get links? Locate the right sites, request a link (not reciprocal) after a little flattery of their work, and provide the html for their ease. Be respectful but not pleading. Be brief but not curt. Expect no more than 5% success rate. It's the holy grail of the holy trinity - the bit that everyone hates doing, but the part that is the most essential of the three.

Work on your title tags, get inbound links, make a useful, enjoyable site to get success in your SEO. That's the SEO Holy Trinity. Now to work!

How to Leverage Other People's Lists to Build your own list

List building should be the main priority of any online business. Having your own in-house list of opt-in subscribers allows you to send marketing messages or recommendations via email to your prospects many times over, increasing your chances of making a sale, or making multiple sales if you're an affiliate marketer.

The tricky part is actually building a decent sized list to begin with that you can start profiting from.

In my experience the best way is undoubtedly by using other people's lists. What I mean by this is simply finding other marketers who have a good sized list, finding a way of accessing that list, and persuading them to join your list.

These people are the ideal people to have on your list because they are already familiar with the concept of receiving email messages from online marketers. Also if they're already subscribed to one marketer's newsletter, and are prepared to join yours as well, then they are, in all probability, happy to not only receive offers from you, but to spend money with you as well. In other words, they're the perfect subscriber that every marketer wants on their list.

So how do you access these other marketers' lists?

Well my preferred method is through writing articles, like this one you're reading at the moment. Writing good quality articles and submitting them to as many article directories as you can will result in a lot of people reading your articles, and subsequently clicking on the link to your site (where your own opt-in page is located) which you should include in the resource box.

More importantly, however, is the fact that these article directories are used by ezine and newsletter publishers to find content for their subscribers. If they pick up your article and include it in their next edition, then your article could potentially be read by several thousand subscribers, who may then click through to your opt-in page and sign up to your newsletter.

To increase your chances of your article being included in ezines, you should also submit your articles directly to the ezine publishers themselves, rather than relying on the off-chance that they will find your article in an article directory.

You should now start to see why so many marketers are using articles to promote their business and drive traffic to their sites. You can get a lot of good quality, targeted subscribers very quickly just by using this method alone, however there are other ways that you can get your site seen by other marketers' subscribers.

One free way is through finding ezine owners who allow their subscribers to place adverts in their ezine for free. This is obviously not as effective as writing articles as less people tend to take any notice of the free ads section of ezines. However, it's free so you might as well use it, even if it's just a one-time offer to new subscribers. You may only get one new subscriber from it, but you never know how much money you could potentially earn from that one person in the future.

A more effective way is by actively purchasing prominent ads in ezines. These cost more simply because they get seen more. Prices vary depending on where in the ezine you want your ad to feature. Writing articles is my preferred method of ezine advertising (albeit an indirect form of advertising), but when I do pay for advertising I don't tend to use positional ads, but instead opt for solo ads. These have constantly got me the best results, and the most subscribers, because they are sent separately from the ezine, so each subscriber only sees your message.

To conclude, there are many ways to build your list that I haven't even touched upon in this article. However, if you want a quality list, ie highly targeted opt-in subscribers who are likely to spend money with you, then advertising, either indirectly through articles, or directly through free or paid advertising in other marketers' newsletters, will deliver the type of subscriber every marketer wants.