Search Engine Optimization What are its advantages & how will you profit from an SEO technique

What is SEO ?

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

How Search Engines work ?The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

Web Crawlers cannot see Images

As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results.

SEO Skills

1)Link Building - link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or

website. There are two types -

Black Hat Link Building - Black hat link refers to the process of acquiring as many links as possible with minimal effort.

White Hat Link Building - White hat link building strategies focus on producing high-quality as well as relevant links to the website.

2) Google Local Marketing - For quite some time since the introduction of Google+ Local, managing local listings and content across Google properties has confused many local SEOs and local business owners alike. Now Google has launched a new, integrated approach called Google My Business.

The core idea is to make it “easier than ever to update business information across Google Search, Maps and Google+.” Think of it as a kind of rudimentary CRM platform for small businesses (SMBs).

3) Copywriting - SEO copywriting is a specialized form of online writing that:

1. Contains keyphrases — words your target reader types into a search box to find the

information she wants.

2. Helps online content rank higher in search results (such as Google.)

3. Drives qualified traffic.1

SEO copywriting is quality writing. Period. The keyphrases shouldn’t make the writing hard-to-read,

sound repetitive, or lose its conversion focus.

How is SEO writing different from traditional copywriting?

The main difference is: SEO writing contains keyphrases. For instance [blue cashmere sweaters] is a

keyphrase.

4) Conversion Rate Optimization - Conversion rate optimization (CRO), or conversion optimization is an Internet Marketing process that increases the amount of visitors that convert into a customer.

A conversion is an action that a visitor to your website takes.

A conversion can really be any goal that adds value to the business. This is usually a business value as in a sale or lead but can also be average order value, revenue per visitor, etc.

Common actions to optimize or improve through Conversion rate optimization (CRO), could be opting in for a special report or lead magnet, buying a product, downloading an app, or really just about any task that is measurable.

Number of desired actions / Number of total visitors to that page x 100 = Conversion Rate

5) Social Media Marketing - Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others.

On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of the implementation of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope (e.g. more active or passive use) and the establishment of a firm's desired social media "culture" and "tone". To use social media effectively, firms should learn to allow customers and Internet users to post user-generated content (e.g., online comments, product reviews, etc.), also known as "earned media", rather than use marketer-prepared advertising copy.

6) Online Marketing - Online marketing refers to a set of powerful tools and methodologies used for promoting products and services through the Internet.

Online marketing includes a wider range of marketing elements than traditional business marketing due to the extra channels and marketing mechanisms available on the Internet.

Online marketing can deliver benefits such as:

Growth in potential

Reduced expenses

Elegant communications

Better control

Improved customer service

Competitive advantage

Online marketing is also known as Internet marketing, Web marketing, digital marketing and search engine marketing (SEM).

Advantages of SEO1) Increased Traffic - Top positions on the search engine result pages receive a majority of the

impressions and clicks, so ranking in these top positions can result in significant traffic increases for your website.

2. ROI - SEO provides trackable and quantifiable results, regardless of whether you are an ecommerce or non-ecommerce site so there are no qualms when it comes to ROI. SEO agencies are able to track nearly every aspect of their strategy, like increases in rankings, traffic and conversions. Comprehensive analytics also provide the ability to drill down at a granular level and see demographic information and other engagement metrics for individuals who have interacted with your website. For Ecommerce sites, SEO agencies can see which paths users take in order to complete a sale, all the way down to which keyword they used to search for you prior to purchasing.

3) Cost effectiveness - SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies because it targets users who are actively looking for your products and services online. SEO's inbound nature helps businesses save money as opposed to outbound strategies like cold-calling. While cold-calling can still be an effective strategy, the leads generated cost 61% more than leads generated by an inbound strategy like SEO. And since SEO also targets users who are actively searching for products and services like yours, the traffic resulting from SEO is more qualified than many other marketing strategies, resulting in cost-savings for companies.

4) Increased site usability – In an effort to make your website easier to navigate for the search engines, SEO simultaneously helps to make your website more navigable for users as well. SEO consists of rearranging the site's architecture and links to make pages within the website easier to find and navigate. This not only makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and find pages, but also makes it easier for users to find information on your website as well.

5) Brand Awareness - Since top position rankings result in significant impressions, having your website in these top positions on the result pages translates to more exposure for your website. Plus, being on the first page for your targeted keywords not only helps users to associate your brand with those keywords, but it instills trust, since companies on the first page are generally perceived to be more trustworthy. The more your pages and content rank in high positions in the search engines, the more chances you have for users to see your content and associate with your brand.

Ways to make money from SEO -

1)Focus on the right keywords- Focusing on keywords that have a high search volume each month isn’t the only factor you should consider. Whether the keyword is a transactional keyword (ie a keyword that a searcher types in to buy something) or an informational keyword (ie a keyword a searcher types in to research something) will make all the difference to how much profit you make from SEO.

2. Improve the performance of your website - Many business owners are happy to spend $3000 or more per month on marketing their business but hesitate when it comes to investing in their website – this is a huge mistake. Your website holds the key to unlocking the full profit potential the Internet provides… the better your website performs, the more profit you will make. One of our recent clients hired us for both SEO and website design. After 4 months of SEO we increased their traffic by 207% from 527 to 1,620 visits per month. We also redesigned their current website, improving their website conversion rate by 327% (ie from 1.33% to 5.68%). The result? We increased the number of sales leads they were receiving to 92 leads for the month, up from 7 leads per month when we first started – an overall increase in performance of 1,214%! That’s the power of a good website.

3) Make a better offer - Your offer is what you’re telling your prospects you will give them if they take action on your website. It can be as bland as ‘contact us’ or as good as a ‘free consultation’ or a ‘free review of their business’. The better you make your offer the more profit you will make from SEO. The key to making a successful offer is to provide something that your prospects value. It will usually cost you either time or money to provide this offer, but the benefits will definitely outweigh the costs .

4) Capture Email Addresses - Most of the people that visit your site will leave and may never come back again. If you have a website conversion rate of 10% you are doing very well but it still means that you are losing 90% of your visitors, maybe forever. By capturing the email addresses of website visitors that aren’t yet ready to take action on your main offer, you can use email marketing to stay in touch with them over time so that when they are ready to buy, they think of you first. Email marketing is one of the best methods of maximising the profits you earn from SEO because you pay for the lead once and you can then market to that lead over and over again.

5) Split- Test your most visited landing Pages - Once you start driving qualified prospects to your website through SEO you’ll find that different web pages on your website have different conversion rates. One page might have a conversion rate of 1%, another might have a conversion rate of 5%. The conversion rate of a web page is affected by a number of factors including what keywords the prospect used to get to the page, the message of the page, the design of the page and the offer you make. One of the most profitable strategies you can implement is regularly split-testing the most visited pages on your website.

Split-testing is the process of creating a copy of a web page, changing just one element on that page

(such as the headline) and then rotating visitors between both versions – the first person will see version

1, the second person will see version 2, the third person will see version 1, and so on.