Last year 47 million websites came online brining the total number of websites actively participating to attract your attention to 234 million by the end of 2009. The number of internet users increased to 1.73 billion, an increase of 18% over the previous year. (resource: Pingdom.com)
With so many users online and an ever increasing number of websites each trying desperately to attract the attention of consumers, your ability to get noticed is more important than ever.
Search Engine Marketing is defined as a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to promote your website by increasing its visibility in search engine results pages (SERP). It’s about being in the right place at the right time. And that’s exactly where you want to be!
Right Place, Right Time
Putting your website in front of your customers at the moment they are looking for your products and services to buy is key to your success.
Mastering the skills needed to succeed with Search Engine Marketing provides you with a major advantage over your competitors. Search Engine Marketing is uniquely suited for small business allowing you to target your customers with a laser like focus, reaching them at the location and time they are willing to buy.
But reaching your customer at the moment they are ready to buy is not easy to do if you don’t possess the right skills. Many small businesses don’t take the time to identify these skills and master them. Doing so leaves a great deal of money on the table and allows your competitors to steal your customers.
Master the right skills and you will be the one stealing customers from your competitors!
What Skills Do You Need
Many small businesses pay thousands of dollars to SEM companies to achieve higher search engine result page rankings. Search Engine Marketing is a vast, $16 billion industry that is to big to cover in one blog post. Yet it is possible to master a few simple skills to give yourself a significant advantage and save you money.
So what are these simple skills and how can you acquire them? The answer is much easier than you may think, and you’ll be surprised to know that mastery of these skills can be done completely for free!
The basic skills needed to master Search Engine Marketing are:
- Keyword Usage
- SEO Copywriting
- Backlinking
- Outbound linking
- Content Marketing
Master these 5 skills and you will achieve a page one ranking on Google, Yahoo and others hours after you publish new content.
Over the next 5 blog posts we’re going to cover each of these skills in detail and transform you into a master Search Engine Marketing guru!
Keyword Usage
Your mastery of keywords is essential to a successful Search Engine Marketing Campaign. The best way to identify the proper keywords used to attract customers is to think like your customers.
Identifying Keywords
Imagine you are your customer and you are looking for your products and services. What are the questions you would ask about how to find your products? What keywords would you type into the search field on a search engine when looking for your products?
When creating content for your website, landing pages and online marketing campaigns, proper keyword research must be conducted before ever creating a thing. You need to think like a customer to find the right combination of keywords.
Keyword Phrases
When choosing your keywords, make sure to chose two to three word keyword phrases. It is much easier to achieve a ranking for multiword phrases than it is for a single keyword.
It also helps you to be more specific and better target your content to ensure you reach the right customers when they are ready to buy.
Keyword Variations
Once you’ve identified what you believe to be the keywords your customers will use to search for you, you’ll need to conduct the proper research to find different variations on those keywords. It is q best practice to include variations of your keywords in your content. This helps search engine bots to quickly identify and relate your content to the proper keywords when serving it up in search results.
Take the following examples on how a variation of the keywords “duck hunting” can be used.
Primary Keyword Usage:
“Following these simple steps when duck hunting”
Variation Usage:
“When hunting for ducks, follow these simple steps”
Tools such as Google AdWords Tool and WordTracker are very useful at helping you research how your customers use your keywords. Use these tools to conduct research on your keywords.
Keyword Search Volume
Select and use keywords that have a monthly search volume of 30,000 or more. 41% of users who visit Google and see your first page ranking will click on it. That’s 12,300 new visits to your website per month! Not bad for a couple hours work.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.
Over using your keywords is known as keyword stuffing or search spam and can get you black listed. The key is to find the proper balance of keywords in relation to the total number of words on the page. Many Search Engine Marketing experts consider 1% to 3% to be the optimal range of usage for your keywords within your content.
A fantastic tool to help you determine your keyword density is Scribe. Scribe provides both a WordPress Plugin and a Web-based tool to analyze your content for proper keyword density as well as other SEO techniques required to rank high in search results.
See my review of Scribe here.
Keyword Prominence
Keyword prominence is a measure of how close a keyword is to the start or beginning of your content it appears. The closer your keyword is to the beginning of your content the more prominent is appears to search engines.
Place your keywords at the beginning of your page title and meta description. This will help to significantly boost your page ranking. It will also ensure a search engine will serve up your content as the most relevant in search results.
Summarizing
Applying these simple keyword rules when creating content for your small business website will go a long way to help you increase your search engine page ranking. It takes a little effort and a small amount of time for big results and it’s well worth the effort!
What’s Next
In the next post, we’ll discuss the next simple skill required to master Search Engine Marketing, SEO Copywriting.
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