Building a website is actually the easy part of online business. Getting your site marketed and actually turning a profit is the hard and time consuming part. With so many online marketing techniques coming and going all the time, it can be a minefield out there. Some of it works, but unfortunately most of it doesn’t.
By the time you buy the latest and greatest new marketing ebooks and software, the market will already be saturated and nobody makes any money. And the internet becomes clogged up with spam websites. But fear not, there are some free and evergreen methods you can use. Here I will discuss the big one – Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.
So What’s this SEO Thing All About?
SEO is the process of optimizing and marketing a website so that it appears high up the ranks of the main search engines. Now there are three main search engines used the most on the internet today. Google is the giant of all search engines, followed by Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo Search. Each one has its own set of rules and conditions your website must comply with. This is known as a ‘search engine algorithm’, a piece of software that filters out the bad, spammy sites as well as credits the good ones.
Now the Google search algorithm changes on a daily basis. One day your site could be at the number one position on the Search Engine Results Pages (or SERP), the next day your listing could fall into the sandbox. The sandbox is the term used for the place your site listing goes when it falls outside of the SERP pages. And once your site falls into it, you will have a tough time climbing out of it. So you need to stay on top of the game and keep an eye on your search engine rankings.
Now the employees at Google don’t even know themselves which algorithm changes are being made. This would give away the game. So the changes are made by Google insiders who have signed non-disclosure agreements, and they never work in the same offices, as this would blow their cover. So really no-one on the outside knows which changes are being made and what to adjust on their websites. So it’s a kind of on-going cat and mouse game, and a lot of trial and error to stay on top.
But having said that, there are still ways of staying on top of your competition, regardless of the algorithm. The first one I will discuss is content relevancy. Google will rank your site higher if you update the site regularly with top quality, unique and informative content. A few articles a week should do the trick. But be sure that the content you use is original – the algorithms these days are very smart and complex and can even ban your site for using duplicate content. So guys, never use Private Label Rights articles ‘as is’, because such content has already been spammed across the internet already.
The other evergreen SEO technique is known as ‘link building’. This involves contacting or signing up to forums and placing links back to your site on these high traffic sites. Now you can do this yourself which can be quite time consuming. The other option is to buy backlinks cheap. Be wary of this one – be sure that the company or individual is reputable. There have been many scams about where they offer you 4000 backlinks within a week or so. Stay away from such offers, as the Google algorithm will detect a sudden burst and de-list your site. I recommend no more than five backlinks a day, so that it looks natural.