Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entails a maelstrom of techniques and tactics with the end goal being to improve the ranking of a particular website in the search results of major search engines. SEO can be broken down into two main categories, on site SEO and off site SEO.

On site SEO relies upon excellent content first and foremost. Content must be on topic, relevant, and contain a 5% – 7% keyword (words or phrases) density. This means that for every 100 words of content, five to eight keywords should be used. The keywords that will be used must be carefully researched using tools such as the free Google AdWords keyword tool. When choosing keywords, it is important to remember to think like the customer. What will they be searching for? These same keywords should also be embedded into the website source code via Meta, Title and Heading tags. This will help ensure a high page ranking for these search terms.

Also, the website should be organized with a clear hierarchical structure. Creating a site map will significantly enhance site structure and ability to be scanned by search engines. This will allow search engines to more efficiently scan the target website. The most important information on a given website should be placed at or near the top of the page. This will make it easier for search engines to find the content that you want them to find. Use text instead of images; search engines can only scan text, so all important information must be included in text. This should be done even if the message(s) being conveyed are duplicated in images, banners, etc.

Of even greater importance is off site SEO. This includes back linking to highly ranked sites. For example, you can submit articles to free online repositories with links to your target website embedded in the text. The Google search engine will interpret a page with many back links to highly ranked pages as being of greater importance, and will therefore increase its page ranking. Another tactic is to submit entries to a highly ranked online blog, with excellent content, important keywords and back links where possible. Furthermore, you can join appropriate, and highly ranked, online forums and post useful content with a signature containing a back link to the target website. You should submit your website to the major search engines’ web indices. This will speed up and enhance the optimization process greatly.

SEO, or internet marketing is a multifaceted endeavor, and requires ongoing maintenance and tuning. There are many competent companies that are dedicated to carrying out SEO campaigns. If page ranking is extremely important to you, consider outsourcing the project to a professional Denver SEO company.

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Search Engine Optimization is much more than just optimizing for the first page of Google. If you have read through our previous posts than you already understand this concept. As a matter of fact when I go to review my monthly analytics a good 26% to 30% of my traffic comes from other sources than the search engines. Granted a good 54.44% of the traffic we obtain comes from search engines but I definitely would not want to give up 26%! In order to get the referral traffic we are exposed through various social networks online as well as several different social bookmarking sites. The whole goal of Guerrilla SEO or Guerilla search engine marketing is to bring traffic to your site without blaring a direct commercial for your services or product.

A good example of Guerilla SEO tactics would be marketing through article marketing to the major article repositories like Ezine Articles. By obtaining an “Expert Author” status you are allowing Ezine Articles to publish your content which in turn allows other users to use your content as long as they post the article “as is” with the links in the resources box. Those links of course (you are usually allowed to links within the resource box) are directed to your website or URL. By establishing yourself as an Expert Author you are accomplishing two things. First you are establishing yourself as a credible source for your service or product and secondly you are not directly selling your services. In this “shared planet” paradigm it is almost forbidden to come right out and ask for business. So by giving you information away without any expectation of reciprocity you are showing your dedication to your profession and opinion on the matter that you are writing about. A good example of this would be an article that I most recently published on SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking. This article has generated a fair amount of hits already (100 views in the last 60 days). I know that is not groundbreaking; however, if I have 20 of these articles generating the same amount of interest as this article than the math is pretty easy, I would be looking at 2,000 views on my articles every month! The conversion of that traffic is at about 2% meaning that I am getting almost 2% of the viewers of this article clicking through to my site, so that is an additional 40 visitors that I am obtaining. If you search for “SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking” you will see that my article is at the top of the rankings for this search term. There are not enough searches for this search term to obtain any kind of data from Google, at the same time obtaining that number one page rank for the search term took little or no effort at all. This is a small added bonus for the article; most of the traffic definitely comes through the article repositories.

Review your competitors “SEO Strategy“, you are usually able to determine which of the links your competition has working for them. You can find your competitors highest page rank link by simply visiting www.seochat.com and going to their “PageRank Search” Page. Once you are on the page rank search page simply type in your competitor’s site www.yourcompetitor.com, select to sort the results by page rank and change the results to show 100 listings per page. Now you have a list of links that your competitor shows up on in order of importance. From here all you need do is copy your competition’s actions on these pages. You can post on a comment section, offer a link exchange or even work on a strategic alliance with some of the webmasters from these pages. The possibilities are sincerely unlimited.

If we use our site as an example, for the keyword “Denver SEO” today’s top player is a site www.denver seo.net, who has most recently obtained a #1 listing in Google for the search term. I can see the various directories that this site has been submitted to and start listing my site for the anchor text “Denver SEO” just as my competitor has done. By doing this and then adding more links to my site I will be able to create more popularity for my domain and get ahead in the rankings!

So what are you waiting for, find out your competitors blueprint to SEO now!

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A few years back, web developers or SEO experts only needed to focus their efforts to “On-Site optimization”.  This means they needed to have appropriate Meta tags, create a sitemap, they needed their pictures to be labeled and correctly link their pages throughout the site.  Only 5-7 years ago, this would get them on the front end of the searches related with their website content. 

Today is a completely different story.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the search engine optimization (SEO) you do off your site is more important than the SEO you do onsite now days.  What I mean here is because of the sophistication of search engines today, there are many more factors that go into the SEO equation to achieve “Above the fold” placement organically.  I feel the more powerful factors have to do with “Off-Site optimization”  Don’t get me wrong, if you’re content is not relative to the searches you are going for, it will be much more difficult to obtain those results but it is possible.

So what is off-site optimization anyway?  Off site optimization is all of the work you can do to promote your website without actually doing anything to the site itself.   Things like building relevant backlinks, using social networking to increase traffic, and video submissions are just a few examples of off-site optimization.

Backlinks:  Think of search engines judging every website like it’s a popularity contest.  Every backlink to a website counts as a vote.  As a search is submitted to a search engine, they gather which sites have relevant content and of those they rank them accordingly to the votes they receive (number of backlinks).  Now anchor text adds even more madness to the equation.  If you have anchor text pointed at your domain with the keyword or phrase you are trying to be found in, that vote has more weight than a regular backlink.  At the end of the day, if you had a million backlinks with anchor text reading “BMW parts”, it’s a pretty good chance you would be in the top three results for that search term regardless of the page content. 

Tip: Join a Forum or a discussion board related to your services or product and start adding useful posts.  Link to your website in your post or signature.

Social Networking:  With all of the buzz with Twitter and other social networking sites, now is the time to take advantage of the traffic that can be developed.  Just creating an account and writing a few posts is not going to do the trick.  You need to be creative just like anything else in your campaign and create excitement about your service or project.  Offer discounts, link to blog posts which then link to your site or some bigger companies even use the social networking sites as a form of customer service.  Everyone has a technique or social networking, many are bad but there are a few that are good and working excellent. 

Tip: Create a LinkedIn page and add as many business professional in your area and send them all a message about your services and offer a discount.

Video Submissions: You might be wondering what creating, editing and submitting a video would have to do with search engine optimization but there are many benefits.  First of all, a video is a good way to connect with potential customers.  A client testimonial will give you credibility while a message from an employee or owner will create a sense of trust.

There are great video repositories out there, maybe you’ve heard of YouTube.com or Viddler.com?  More and more people are using these sites to host videos, create commercials for the business and increase the traffic to their web site.  Recently, YouTube.com just passed the 100 billion viewed videos in one month, pretty dang impressive.  Geek.com reports YouTube.com overcoming Yahoo© taking the number 2 search engine.  Don’t you think it’s time you start taking advantage of the traffic?  Make sure you have a YouTube.com video that points to your website.

Tip: When you create a video to YouTube, you have the ability to put in keywords.  Use this to your advantage and attrack more viewers looking for your services

Hopefully you now understand the importance of off site optimization and have picked up a few techniques to try yourself.  Remember, SEO is not something that happens overnight and certainly is very time consuming.

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