Nowadays, even the smallest company uses the Internet as a main tool in building a customer base, keeping in contact with their clients and this is also their most basic means of advertising.

Designing a company website is cheap and effective, not to mention essential because the world wide web is the only medium that offers instantaneous information access to millions of users around the globe.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key towards building an effective website that would get a lot of hits and visitors. A website that nobody visits is useless so the challenge lies in leading Internet users to visit your website.

Thus, your website need to be “found” when users type in keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL and others.

Once a keyword relating to the products or services that you offer is keyed into a search engine, a direct link to your website should emerge on top of the list.

You should employ search engine optimization techniques to lead traffic your way, and get more hits that would later on lead to more profit for your company, which is your goal in the first place.

Here are some search engine optimization tips on how you can make it to the top of the list of search engines and use your SEO techniques to benefit your website and your company:

SEO Technique 1: If you have an existing website and domain, just optimize the one that you currently have instead of purchasing a new domain.

It will take some time before your website will show up in a particular search engine, like Google, so it better to use the one that you currently have instead of switching to a new one.

SEO Technique 2: Know who your target audience is and aim for them.

If you are in the manufacturing industry and a user types in your product in a search engine, then you would immediately have your target right in front of you.

As soon as the user hits the Enter button or clicks on ‘Search’, then the person will be lead to your website.

Make sure that your target market will get ‘hooked’ on your website. Once the search engines show the link to your website, their job is done.

What you should do next is to make sure that your visitor will not leave your website without them trying out your products or services, or at least leaving some pertinent information so that you can contact them in the future for marketing and advertising purposes.

When hitting a particular target market, learn about their interests, location and age to have an idea of what you can offer them in return.

Also, you can somehow link their interests to your products and services.

SEO Technique 3: Search for the right keyword.

You should be creative, persistent and flexible when looking for the keyword or keyword phrases to use in optimizing your website.

Google and Yahoo offer some SEO tips and tools on how you can come up with keywords that will yield results.

Do not settle for just one keyword. You can also vary the words and phrases that you use for each page on your website so that you can have more hits.

SEO Technique 4: Consider your target market when designing your website.

The design itself would include the general theme of the website. You should also pay attention to smaller details such as color and font style and size.

Make sure that the website is user-friendly and do not forget to insert helpful articles, tips, hints and related links that can be shared to other users.

It is a good thing to have an option to send a link or an article to a friend, which will add more users and increase your client base.

There should also be various ways to browse through your website, to fit each user.

A person might find it to difficult use the scroll down option so you should also provide hyperlinks which are accessible to them.

SEO Technique 5: Concentrate on the website content.

Regularly update the content of your website so that old and new users can find something new when browsing through your website.

Make the content brief and precise. Writing a content which has more than 600 words will make the users lose interest, since most of them do not actually read but just skim through the text. *Don’t take SEO too much into account: your visitors should come first!

Strive to be the best and most comprehensive website and you will make your mark when it comes to information about the products and services that you offer.

It helps a lot to pay attention to detail, too .

Finally, keeping your website’s content updated is a must (first, to keep your readers reading and second, for SEO purpose).

Spread the word about your website and use these basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and you will surely gain positive results once users visit your website.

Thus, end my rambling on “5 Essential SEO Techniques in Building a SEO Website.” For more SEO techniques, please check out the SEO Techniques category.

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Wait!–Hold your horses . Let me first explain ‘what is search engine optimization‘?

To simply put, the ultimate aim of legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) is to get more visitors to a search engine optimized website. This simply means that search engine optimization’s goal is to make a website appear on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs), so the ‘chance’ of people click-through to your search engine optimized website is HIGHER than those on the 2nd or 3rd page of the SERPs.

Thus, one reason why you should choose search engine optimization is because with more visitors from the free organic search, you have more means and ways to monetize your website .

There are other ways to get on the first page of the search engine results page too, but–you’ve guessed it–it’s NOT free (e.g. pay-per-click program like Google Adwords .

In case you didn’t know, search engines evaluate websites by using what they call “spiders” or “bots,” and these bots and spiders have NAMES too =P. (Check your website’s raw log and you can see them all over the place–well, if your site is nested with quality content that is .

Anyway, these spider bots visit and scan your website and collect information about it. The information then gets collated and passed on to the search engine index–the library of your website’s web pages. So, when a search engine users input the keyword/keyword-phrase into the search box, another program in the search engine serves up the pages in its index library according to the relevance of the search query–and, yes, with the most relevant ones listed on the first page of the SERPs.

You may have seen it, you know, when you search for the keyword phrase ’search engine optimization’: there are “…about 42,600,000 for search engine optimization” (this info is on the upper-right corner of Google SERP). What that means is that, there are 42,600,000 pages in the index that is relevant to the keyword phrase ’search engine optimization’.

Anyway, to answer the question, below are a couple of reasons why ‘legitimate’ search engine optimization is important:

Reason1. Legitimate Search Engine Optimization Produces ‘Long-Term’ FREE Organic Traffic

The main purpose of search engine optimization is to increase the traffic generated by a search engine optimized website. Search engines have become the building blocks of the foundation of the Internet and its users. A survey showed that 90% of all Internet users employ search engines to aid them in their Internet-related activities. Google, the dominant player in the search engine industry, generates 70% of all search-related Internet activity compared to other search engines.

Reason 2. Legitimate Search Engine Optimization ‘Continues’ to Answer People Queries with Quality Content

Search engines exist and continue to exist because they help people find what they’re looking for. Search engine and people are alike. They both like site’s with pack-full of content that have the potential to answer their question thoroughly–basically any website that contains substantive information about a certain topic.

The best content-quality search engine optimized websites ‘usually’ appear first in the search engines, because search engines want to provide relevant helpful content to their users/customers. The benefits are mutual for both search engines and a search engine optimized website. As search engines want to make their users happy with helpful content-filled sites, they will continue to serve up those content-filled websites in the 1st page of SERPs (to answer their users’ queries).

Reason 3. Legitimate Search Engine Optimization Helps Getting Target Audience/Visitors/Customers

The use of the search engine to be able to target one’s target audience is one of the most effective online marketing strategies. It is not like other online marketing techniques (such as email marketing) which can lead to a lot of leakages in terms of targeting the right audience.

Since search engines segment the market and connect the right people together, search engine optimization helps increase your exposure to targeted niche market.

Reason 4. Legitimate Search Engine Optimization is Cost-Effective and Cost-Efficient for Your Effort

One can do search engine optimization under the assumption that he knows what he is doing. Search engine optimization is a full-time job and has a very long learning curve. This is why most people would resort to out-sourcing the job to experts who are good at what they do. One should be cautious, however, in hiring a search engine optimization company or consultant. Factors such as pricing and service should carefully be assessed before signing a deal. If done properly, search engine optimization is a very cost effective way of getting more people to know about one’s products or to know about a certain issue or event that a website is disseminating.

*You can read more about this in my post on “Do-It-Yourself SEO Techniques vs. Third Party SEO Services.”

Anyway, to summary, legitimate search engine optimization is important for your websites, because it expands your reach to more targeted customers/search engine users. Also, ‘legitimate’ search engine optimization does not only generate traffic from the targeted audience, but it is also a cost-effective way of optimizing your website for ‘long-term’ success.

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Well, you’ll have to decide–whether these SEO tips can help you toward becoming a legit, ‘white-hat’ SEOer.

But first, let me clarify that the world wide web, search engine optimization (SEO) specifically, is a highly competitive market. Businesses & corporations vying for the attention of millions of search engine users have paid hefty sums to SEO services to conquer their ’search’ competitors.

A lynch pin to the Internet Marketing War is the Search Engine War.

Over the years, search engines have become the internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The kind of traffic the dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-etc companies receive per hour is phenomenal!

Accordingly, in order to maximize their search engine rankings and placements, companies employed every possible SEO tools and SEO services they can get their hands on–usually at exceptional fees. But their Return On Investment for free organic traffic is unexceptionally beneficial.

So, without further ado, here are a few fast SEO tips on various search engine optimization techniques to improve your search engine results:

SEO Tip 1. Expertise.
Follow your strengths. Webites you set up must be on subject you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

SEO Tip 2. Plan the site.
A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

SEO Tip 3. Research.
Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

SEO Tip 4. Decide on important keywords.
Decide on the most important keywords to use for your website. Include these keywords in the meta-tags, copy page, page title, file names, and anywhere where you can put them =P. Just don’t overdo it to an ‘abnormal’ status => keyword stuffing.

SEO Tip 5. The Search Engine is your friend.
Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your website up to your target audience. This means no black hat stuff, e.g. keyword stuffing with the same color as the color background . The search engines have already smelled this trick years ago. So, don’t do it if you don’t want to be banned by the search engines .

SEO Tip 6. Focus.
Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The rule is one topic or ONE keyword/keyword-phrase per page. You don’t want to compete yourself with the same keyword/keyword-phrase on another page.

SEO Tip 7. Submit your website to good page rank (PR) directories.
Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right/high PR directory may shoot your website up in the SERP ranking. Of course, make sure the website that you submitted to the directories is relevant to them (or in the right category).

SEO Tip 8. Start a linking campaign.
A most effective SEO method. This is a must to do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their websites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of the site based on the number of ‘relevant’ sites linked to it with the ‘correct/consistent’ keyword-loaded ANCHOR TEXT.

SEO Tip 9. Repeat: repetition is the key to victory.
Keep repeating the above SEO tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

Those are my FAST “9 SEO Tips to Out-flank Your Opponent in the Search Engine War.” I’ll go into more details later, but for now, for more SEO tips and information, please check out the SEO Tips category.

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