Consider the following: I’ve shared some valuable messages with you. But if nobody was coming to my web site it really wouldn’t matter how valuable the messages are would they? Regardless of how good your product, service or information is, if people aren’t going to your site, it’s of little value. We have lots of helpful, free information at this website that will show you how to do your own Search Engine Optimizing. And, of course, if you prefer, you can leave the technical tedious work to us. That’s our job. That’s what we’re good at.

If you live in the Santa Barbara, CA area, we offer a free Santa Barbara SEO workshop every Thursday at the Eagle Inn designed to help you understand what you need to do or have done in order to get the right traffic to your website.

Contact me directly if you have any questions at 800-605-4988, I offer a free 30 minute Consultation in your office if you would like me to come out to your office and give you some thoughts about how I would approach your e-business plan. But please take action and optimize your website. You will be glad you did and happy with the results!

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1. Get Listed in Search Engines and Optimize Your Site

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about how to get the search engines to notice your site, and, ideally, to give you a good ranking. Then, when someone searches for what you are offering, your listing will be displayed in a high position. Today most of the search engines will spider your site automatically, but there are benefits to paying for expedited submissions of your site, especially to engines like Yahoo ($300/year) and Dmoz (free). This does not guarantee that you’ll get a better rankings, just that they will spider (a program that automatically fetches web pages) your site sooner than they would without the additional fee. Before you submit to the search engines, you will want to make sure your site is optimized with the best keywords, that is, words or phrases, that your target market types into the search engines.

2. Research Your Target Market To Discover Target Keywords

How do you decide which keywords and phrases will help you drive the most traffic? You focus on the urgent needs and compelling desires of your target market. Put yourself in your customers shoes, and think of what they will type in to find you. Often times it’s not what you think. Understanding your best keywords is essential for the success of all of your online marketing. The best keywords are emotional, benefit filled terms that:

• Have high daily search counts
• Have the least amount of competition
• Draw targeted traffic that are ready willing and able to invest in your services (high commercial intent)

3. Make Your Site More Attractive To Search Engines

After you discover your best keywords and phrases, take these seven actions to optimize your site, or better yet, hire someone to do it for you:

1. Create a unique title for every page on your site with the keywords for that page in the title—the title should describe the benefits you provide.
2. Make sure your web designer is using the <h1> and <h2> tags on your webpages and including your keywords and phrases in them.
3. Search engines consider these tags to contain the most important content descriptions of what is on the page.
4. Put your keywords in the text that is linked to subpages on your site.
5. Use your keywords and phrases in the copy text of your site—even bold them in a few places, but don’t go crazy.
6. Include your keywords at the top and bottom of your pages, but again, don’t go crazy. Include your keywords in the ALT attribute of your <IMG> tag.
7. Tell your web designer to include your keywords in the TITLE attribute of your <A> tag.

Here are a few things NOT to do:

1. Don’t try to trick the search engines. That is not the Search Engine Pros way, and you’ll get blacklisted from Google and other search engines if they suspect you are trying to manipulate them. No one likes to be fooled, and especially not search engines.
2. Do not try to stuff your keywords by repeating them over and over again. Do not use over 4-5% keyword density.
3. Do not try to hide your keywords with using invisible font colors.
4. Use Flash and frames sparingly, neither are search engine friendly

Search engines are in the business of serving up relevant content to their customers that match search terms. Your goal is to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to understand what your site is all about. This will increase your chances at getting indexed (top ranks) in the engines. Get Started Today

4. Boost Your Link Popularity

Boosting your link popularity (the number of inbound links) and having quality inbound links (links from sites that have a good ranking and serve the same target market as you) pointing to your web site will help you in two ways:

• It improves your search engine ranking
• It provides a way for more quality traffic to find your site

Please refrain from using link farms or other spammy link efforts. Building inbound links must be done legitimately. It’s important to realize that you need to exchange links with prominent, relevant websites. Exchanging links with your brother’s MySpace page he started last week will not do much for your search engine ranking. The goal is to get links from well known authority sites in your niche. This work, while not particularly difficult, it is hard core labor & extremely time consuming.

5. Leverage Your Email Signature

Perhaps the best free marketing you can get is in your email signature. This is often the most overlooked methods of promoting a web site. It’s a simple and effective way to tell people about what you have to offer, and encourage them to learn more. You might consider adding a link in your signature to the most important areas of your site.

6. Promote Your Site Using Article Directories

Google and other search engines rank websites with rich, meaningful content very highly. One of the best ways to build your credibility and drive traffic to your site is by writing information articles on topics related to your business, and submitting them to Article directories online. Article directories are places where people go to obtain content for their sites. When you provide other’s the ability to use your article on their site, the result is a higher search engine ranking for your site. Why is this? Those articles contain backlinks to your site.

A backlink is a link from another site, pointing your site. You can think of backlinks as “votes” for your site. Getting top ranks is a bit like a popularity contest in some respects whereby popularity is determined by how many inbound links you have pointing to you. It’s similar to someone putting your business cards out in their office lobby, only online, it’s done in the form of a backlink.

The reason that they are beneficial to the owner of the article is that they must be re-published “as is,” including links to the website of the owner. When people post your article, they’ll also be posting a link to your website – thus increasing your traffic and your credibility in the eyes of search engines. Submitting content to article directories is a technique employed by most search engine professionals because it provides not only links from high PR web sites with relevant keyword associations, but also because it increases traffic.

Similarly, online press releases are very powerful as well. Press Releases are very similar to Article Submission Strategy, the difference is that Press Releases focus efforts towards news rooms, and typically have breaking news content.

Lastly, writing articles builds massive credibility. Each article has a “About The Author” box which shows you as a trusted advisor on your topic. Trust levels increase when prospects see you have taken the time to understand your industry with these articles. Get Top Ranks Now!

7. Participate In Blogs, Discussion Boards And Forums

In the ocean of information, there are many locations where you can post a link pointing back to your web site. There are literally 1000′s of relevant directories that will accept your link, and 1000′s more relevant blogs and forums. Inclusion creates a powerful one-way-link factor. Some internet marketers argue that the best links you can get, are ‘contextual links’. Contextual refers to relevancy and context. The idea is that Google ranks sites based on relevancy. If your inbound links are on relevant pages to your topic, Google likes this. If you have spam links across hundreds of non-relevant web pages, Google is likely to see this as a manipulation tactic. Where possible, participate in blogs and forums that are related to your industry. Post comments & questions and always include your URL listed in your signature. The name of the game is to have meaningful interaction with online communities through blogs and forums to have a legitimate reason to list your URL as many times as possible, thus skyrocketing your link popularity through one-way-links. Link enhancement thru Blogs & Forums is also a labor intense process which cannot be implemented through software. To post a comment, a human must read the blog, and make an insightful, helpful response. There is an art to ‘navigate’ through blogs & forums, but it is definitely worth the time invested since Google loves contextual one-way-links!

8. Cross Promote Through Marketing Partners

This is one of my favorite online marketing strategies because it allows me to partner with, and promote, other people who are I think are fantastic. Finding your centers of influence and partnering with them is another critical key to success in business, both online and offline. Getting other people to talk about you, i.e. do blog reviews or email newsletter mentions, is vital to your success. I have a template email I use to approach and engage complimentary business partners that works very well.

9. If You’re Not Tracking, Your Guessing! Conversions Must Be Tracked

Ask any marketer the key to a successful marketing campaign, and they will likely respond: “Tracking, Tracking, Tracking.” To two I recommend are Get Clicky and Google Analytics. I set all of my client’s up with Getclicky.com tracking accounts and setup conversion goals. A conversion goal is quite simply a piece of code placed on the Thank you page (the thank you page is seen after someone buys a product at your site, or subscribes to your newsletter, or submit a contact form). Anytime my customers get a lead from their site, they know precisely which search engine, and keyword, referred that visitor. Using this method, we are able to fine tune the marketing strategy so it sings like a beautifully song.

Conversion tracking is one of the overlooked aspects of a web site is conversion. You can attract all the traffic you want to your site, but if it’s not converting, what good is it? We help businesses track traffic, so they stop marketing blindly and start making better use of their marketing budgets. This alone is probably worth more than the cost of what we do. That doesn’t count all the extra traffic and sales. As with any good advertising vehicle, you should expect 2 to 3 times return on any money you spend with us.

10. Pay Per Click Vs. SEO
Time is money in any business. If you have lots of spare time and money to test the market, you can also become an Adwords pro. If not, you can rely on the PPC Bid Management services rendered by The Search Engine Pros. Google pay per click may seem like an easy endeavor. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can lose a lot of time and money. PPC is great for tracking demand before investing in organic keywords as you can quickly gather feedback on market conditions. We help you with split testing your ads, constantly trying to beat control ad. This is called A-B Ad testing, and this strategy yeilds powerful results.

Why SEO?

I’ve learned that there are 7 important reasons you need to have a top search ranking:

1. Free Clicks: Obviously, probably the first thing that comes to mind is the free traffic that comes with natural search engine rankings. So you don’t pay for the traffic. Organic Search Engine Traffic is free, whereas Pay Per Click Traffic, you have to pay per click. The nice thing about natural search rankings vs. paid Search Rankings…is that when you run a campaign, you don’t need to pay per click.
2. Minimal Maintenance: Another benefit that there is minimal maintenance that is required to maintain top ranks. Once you get the top ranks, you really only need to do a minimal amount of work to keep those top natural ranks.
3. Long Term Revenue Streams: another great benefit. You can see a revenue stream for a long period of time. Top Ten Rankings is where the money is at. There real place to be is on the first page.
4. Competitive Advantage: Huge competitive advantage over your competition. Your competitors don’t know how to do this…Less than 10% of the websites today are optimized, and 81% of consumers are now making purchasing decisions online.
5. Increased Value: Having top search ranks for your site increases the value of your site dramatically.
6. The Snowball Effect: Another advantage is that it gives you more control – because you are ranked high, link partners come looking for you, and your traffic levels grow exponentially.
7. Credibility: Your site enjoys more credibility. Two sites, Site A has 100 top ranks, and Site B has 0 top ranks – which site is your customer likely to buy from?

There are a lot of advantages to have a top ranked website….especially as more and more customers move online. I would like nothing more than to help you achieve the online presence and status that you’ve imagined obtaining. And along with it the success you know you deserve!