Nov 02 2008
Business Building with SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may start with search rank positioning, but in terms of business building, SEO goes well beyond basic web page optimization. In the same way location is important to brick and mortar business traffic, SEO is important to locating your business on the Internet.
When you consider the billions of web pages with unique locations all competing for attention in an over-communicated, multi-media, global village, the battle for your mind can be expressed as positioning. SEO is the art and science of positioning your business on the Internet.
Positioning is not just about page rank because if location is virtual, then it’s always changing. Therefore, positioning must also include the discipline of constant research, testing, tracking and refinement in order to achieve and maintain your search rank.
In the same way keywords and headlines are important to your advertising and sales pages, they must also be included in your SEO media mix to the point that they are connected and congruent with your message from beginning to end – from SEO to sale.
SEO starts with on page optimization that includes your domain name, preferably including a keyword, and with robot friendly title, description and keyword meta tags. All things being equal at this point, the tiebreaker comes down to links. Link building is a process of collecting and maintaining one way and reciprocal links. Links are a factor in measuring the authority of your site.
A popular way for one way linking is through article marketing and there is a number of paid and free reciprocal link software available. For example, you can get both types of links back to your site when you visit the http://waymore.info site resources section that includes an article directory and a linking page.
Two of the hottest ways to gather intel on your competitors and track your positions are with Google Page Rank and Alexa web information. A quick an easy Firefox add-on that displays rank data in the status bar is called Search Status. Another more comprehensive data gathering add-on is called SEO Quake. You can get them here.
In summary, the general process of SEO includes keyword research as part of audience profiling, on-page meta tags plus off-page linking optimization, and checking Google and Alexa page rank. While the overall concept is relatively easy to understand, set up takes a bit of time. The hard part of SEO is to monitor and refine your web site position because it takes time and discipline to build your business with SEO on a regular basis.
