How
to kick start your business with SEO & SEM
Who is this for?
If you are a webmaster who is about to start his/her first online
business or web site, you probably know that it is not that easy
to get high traffic to your site. In fact, nowadays it takes a lot
more work to be successful online, than it had been some years ago.
The main factor that influences your success is that most business
or web site owner do not know anything (useful) about search engine
optimization (SEO) and/or search engine marketing (SEM). These terms
are wide-spread, however, a lot of people just know of it as a way
to get ranked high in the search engines.
There are tons of webmasters and web site owners who would like
to know more about SEO strategies in order to kick start their business.
If you have enough funds to hire a SEO company to do the promotional
work for you, you would probably not sift through the internet and
find out more about SEO, unless you are eager to learn more and
more. So this article is mainly for those who start out with SEO
and want to know more about the strategies to not only rank high
in the search engines, but also prosper and do well in satisfying
visitors or prospects.
Why do I need SEO & SEM to rank high?
The question is why businesses and web sites do need to promote
their web sites well these days, unlike some years ago, when everyone
was about to submit to a few of the established directories and
was seeing an increase in traffic through spreading the word. The
answer is: A few things have changed. The search engines have developed
very complex algorithms in order to find relevant web sites and
separate them from the non-relevant web sites. These algorithms
are quite complicated and not revealed to anybody outside of the
search engines.
The problem is that, in order to reach high ranking and traffic,
you need to prove your web site to be trustworthy and relevant for
the world. Relevance can be reached through search engine optimization,
whereas trustworthiness is reached through the marketing and promotion
of your web site to other relevant and related web sites. There
are theories about a so-called sandbox or trustbox that is used
by Google, however, they have never been confirmed to be existing
to 100%. This sandbox theory claims that every new web site is put
in a box for a specified probation period. While in the box the
site is not ranked well and does not receive a PageRank. The trustbox
theory claims that the probation period is more likely to be defined
by trusted and relevant back links.
Whether one of these theories is real or not, fact is that you
need to optimize your business for the search engines and then promote
it. The main thought is that you should try to gain as many one-way
links as possible. One-way links, also referred to as inbound links,
are link that are directed to your site without your site to be
linking back to that site. In past the so-called reciprocal links
have been wide-spread in order to build your linking and prove your
trustworthiness and/or relevance. However, these days, one-way links
are more than appreciated and worth it!
How to approach? How to gain one-way links and kick start
my business now?
This is a very complex topic and it is impossible to tell you
about any existing and proved strategy at once. Nevertheless there
are some easy but time consuming ways to kick start your business
or web site. Before everything can begin, however, you should first
optimize your website. There are some resources on the internet
that tell you about optimization etc.
After you are done with it, promote your web site to (free) web
directories first. Web directories provide you with one-way links
without the need to link back to them. Well, in fact there are a
lot of directories that require reciprocal links back, but these
are not the ones you should submit to. Submit to SEO friendly free
web directories first, apart from the Open Directory Project/DMOZ.
Then after you have done this exhausting work, write quality articles
and spread them. Be active in forums. Publish a blog relating to
your area and regularly write in it to attract readers and prospects.
These are one of the main sources for getting your first traffic
and back links, which raise your PageRank.
Now go on and find out about the variety of mistakes you can do
while optimizing and promoting like Over Optimization. You might
want to visit Web
Site Search Engine Optimization.
About the Author Sebastian Schneider
is the webmaster of Web
Site Search Engine Optimization, the site about common SEO mistakes,
free SEO training and techniques, as well as a regularly updated
list of free, paid and niche web directories.
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