Five Steps for Search Engine Optimization Success

SEO can be daunting. It’s an ongoing process that may not yield fast results, and there’s no way to guarantee specific ranking for your site. Here are five steps will simplify the process:

• Review objectives and goals: Why do you want more search engine visibility? Are you trying to increase sales, gain leads, increase readership of your newsletter, and encourage visitors to use a store locator to find your physical locations or boost site traffic to increase advertising revenue?
• Monitor the competition: Search engine marketing uniquely allows you to check out your competitor. If you have a gardening website, you can type “gardening” (and related terms such as “gardens,” “flowers” and “lawn care”) into the major search engines—Google, Yahoo, and MSN—and see your competition, which may surprise you. If you’re selling gardening products, you might assume your competitors are other retailers, but in search engines, you are also competing with news sites, personal websites from gardening enthusiasts and reference guides. Any sites that use your key words now count as your competition.
• Research keywords: Studying the keywords your consumers use to find you and your competitors tells you how your customers think. Consider the words consumers use to find you and the words you want to be associated with.
• Measure results: You can monitor your site traffic by keyword. Establishing current benchmarks allows you to see changes over time. Google offers a free Analytic tool, or you can invest in a more sophisticated system such as, Omniture.com,Coremetrics.com, WebTrends.com
• Launch the program: Depending on the number of pages on your site, the goals you want to accomplish, and how well your site is already optimized, this can involve a few quick fixes or a lengthy, labor-intensive process. There are three main components to SEO

=>Technical changes: (e.g., update page titles to reflect the key you selected and design pages so search engines can easily read them)
=> Gain more links to your site:(such as from affiliates, partners, blogs, and other sources => Update the content on your site to reflect how you want search engines and consumers to see you: (e.g. adding richer product descriptions, posting article and reference materials, and encouraging consumers to submit) their own content