Search engine marketing requires
elements of your web site to be optimized so your site gains popularity with the search
engines. There are two ways to do this: pay-per-click or naturally.

Pay-per-click search engine marketing requires you to bid and pay for specific search
engine rankings. This can be advantageous in that you can quickly achieve a high response
rate. This is helpful in testing ad copy and response rates. However, it isdisadvantageous because you have to pay for every single click. On the other hand, natural
search engine rankings take longer to achieve but are less costly, they can never bee 100% free,
you always have to have savings up to build your backlinks and market your site.

How do you do this? How do you know what the search engines are looking for?
Some top predictors include content in relation to keywords, meta keyword and meta
description tags, your site’s title and its link popularity. Although meta tags are not
used by most search engines anymore, it does not hurt to include them in your header. You need to know that
achieving high search engine rankings for more than a few words on any given web page is very
difficult to do. This is why some sites grow so big as different pages are created for each
keyword. Of course, the site then has to optimize these pages for the specific keyword that
they are trying to achieve search engine rankings for.

Other than that, focus on one main keyword, if you say, for example own a site about “baseball cards”,
and have subpages that includes “80′s baseball cards” and “Babe Ruth baseball cards”. It is good to target a few extra keywords for your
subpages instead of targeting just “baseball cards”. Those keywords are less competitive and will help you gain better rankings.

Optimizing a web page also requires that the writing on the web page contain between a 3%
and 5% keyword density. This is the percentage of times you insert your keyword into your
writing when compared to the other words that are used. So, if you are creating a site about
“volleyball” you will need to make sure that the term “volleyball” is included in your page’s
title, keywords and description. Then for every 100 words you write, the keyword”volleyball”
will need to be used at least three times. Also make sure you use header tags around your targeted keywords.
Take the extra step to include an image alt code to your images, these keywords are usually indexed
by search engines.

One very important thing to do when you are building a strong natural search engine
ranking is to work on increasing your link popularity (the number of web sites that link
to your site). This can be done by adding your site to directories, you can even pay someone to do this for you.
Trading links with other sites with the same or related content as yours. Update your articles and submit them to various article directories that allow you to place your link in your profile.
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You can rank number one (Or at least in the top ten) for just about any search phrase by just buying text link ads, even if the web site isn’t related to the search phrase in anyway, it can still rank in the top ten of the search results. Some web site owners see this as the only true way to the top ten. So, should you buy your way to the top? Or should you play it safe?

Some say it’s better to be safe than sorry. While others say if you play it safe and never make it to the top ten of the search results, your losing anyway. So, it must be much better not to play by the rules and get a top ten ranking and make a little money before you get banned from the search engines. Well, it’s not that easy and you can see the cons and pros in both ways.

First let’s look at the pros of playing it safe. The first one is obvious and it’s that you have a lot less chance of getting banned and much safer. At the same time you can peacefully sleep at night without worrying whether you’ll be banned the next day you wake up. It also allows you to save money and spend it else where, such as PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines, banner advertisement, mailing list and offline advertising.

You can also rank number one without buying text link ads if you provide good content because many other webmasters will link to you just because you have good content and it provides their users with valuable information. You could also exchange links with other web sites. If you correctly SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your web site you can get a fairly good search engine ranking.

There are also several cons of playing it safe. Besides the fact that text link ads help improve your search engine ranking, they also bring in a good amount of traffic. In order to get a good amount traffic from links you would need more than just a few backlinks, but since you won’t be buying them, you will not being getting that many web sites linking to you and most of them are from web sites that are not popular among internet users.

All the major search engines see backlinks from quality sites as a vote for the web site being linked to, by playing it safe it will take much longer to get a top ten ranking because of the lack of backlinks. It can take years before you will rank for any popular search term because you will only be getting links the natural way. Without many backlinks you’ll also have a hard time getting in the search engines.

Now the pros of buying text link ads. Buying text links ads will help improve your search engine ranking, which can bring more traffic than from a link from any web site because. Each link acts as a vote your web site in the search engine’s eye, so the more you buy, the higher you’ll rank. If you buy an enough text link ads your web site can rank number one for just about any search term.

Text link ads can also send a fair amount of visitors that’s targeted. Resulting in more and new customers. Getting a link from a web site that’s trusted and well known can help build your web site’s brand and increase your credibility because visitors will see the link as a recommendation to your web site. Which will also help bring in new customers because they trust you more than they did before.

The cons of buying text link ads make many people think twice about buying text link ads. It will cost a lot of money to buy text link ads. You need to pay for your link to stay on a web site for at least two months before you will see any major boost in your search engine ranking. You may never get your money back because there’s so many things that can go wrong.

It can also hurt your search engine rankings if you don’t do it correctly and safely. You should never buy a lot of text links ads all at once, some search engines can detect this and may ban your web site from the search results due to this. There are other ways the search engines can find out that the links are being sold, meaning some links on certain web sites may never count in the search engines.

The Conclusion – Now that you have seen the pros and cons you can decide for your self whether you should buy them or not.
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So you’re interested in getting your site or blog in No. 1 position for your keyword, eh? Who wouldn’t be? Getting that spot means lots of traffic (depending on the search volume) and more money in your pocket, right? From that free organic traffic, you can not only expose your site to make sales but also build your list, refer traffic to other sites for profits, make money from AdSense, or sell your ad space, etc. The list of profiting from that traffic is endless.

But how? What are the best and quickest ways possible to make that happen? That is the question. Well, the basic answer I can give to you is this. You need to do some “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” on and off your site.

Onsite Optimization (10%)

- You need to insert your keyword in all your meta tags – Title, Description, Keywords.
- Then insert your keyword in the headline, body (1st, 2nd and last paragraphs).
- Structure your blog or site in a way that’s SEO friendly. More details are in my free report.

Offsite Optimization (90%)

- This is in short creating backlinks. If your competitor has 1000 links pointing back to his/her page, you need to have more than 1000 links pointing back to your page. Simple as that. Sometimes, the domain age and how many edu or gov links they have may be counted as important ranking factors but generally, how many backlinks they have is the most important ranking factor.
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I have no doubt that the majority of people who have taken the time to read this article are aware of the difficulties and complexities of trying to go about effective search engine optimization for their websites. Due to the ever increasing competition of websites in the popular niches it has now become more important than ever to make sure you are 5 steps ahead of your competitors to reap the rankings you believe your websites deserve. Lets take a look below at some helpful link building tips to help you with your website optimization

Link Building and Advertising Techniques:

1. Directory submissions: This is probably the most effective and known method of achieving a high quantity of backlinks to your website. By submitting your website to search engine friendly directories and related categories can increase the ranking of their website over time. It is very important to alternate up to 3 different titles and descriptions when submitting of your website to directories for SEO reasons. It may take a long time for submissions to be accepted but this method of gaining backlinks is essential.

2. Forum and Blog Posting: These two ways of building up backlinks can also be effective but most people just end up spamming other blogs and forums for the main aim of trying to obtain immediate traffic and sales. Having said this, don’t bother submitting poor affiliate based websites in your posts as the chances are high that you will get banned. However if you have a blog that advertises a link to a product or service then it will most likely be okay, and in that case can largely help the ranking of your website after time provided the post is on a forum related to your niche.

3. Submission To Article Directories: Going about writing quality articles with niche related content and submitting them to top ranked article directories can help you receive good amounts of web traffic and also help build quality backlinks. Be sure to include a backlink to your website in the resource box using anchor text for a good keyword in your niche.You may even discover that if related websites in your niche find your article, they will probably put a link to it on their website which will give you more exposure and traffic.

4. Link Exchanges: Exchanging links with websites in your niche is also an essential technique which will once again get you very high quality backlinks, which can sometimes be more effective than doing a couple of hundred submissions to directories. Take a look around at the many SEO forums which have link exchange rooms and post a message about the type of website you wish to exchange links with. There is always someone willing to exchange links.

5. Pay Per Click:For those of you who have commercial websites or any websites for that matter, using pay per click programs like adwords can provide immediate targeted traffic to your website. You just need to work out a good budget and make sure you don’t waste too much money as one can get addicted to this easy traffic method.
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As a full time article marketer, I get this question a lot. One article gets you two links in the author resource box. You can have both links pointing to the same page, or to different web pages.

When getting back links, be as specific as possible. For instance, if you have 2 links in your author box, you can have 1 link pointing to your homepage, and 1 link pointing to an internal page. The link that’s pointing to the internal page should lead directly to more specific information. Say you are selling a link building ebook. You can have a link that says “link building ebook” in the anchor text and then link directly to that page. Don’t link to the homepage and make the visitor hunt high and low for the sales page.

So, back to the question, how many back links will be enough? The answer to this question depends on a few variables.

1) Competition.

You must first be able to make a quick assessment of the competition. A crude way of doing this is to search for all web pages with your target keyword phrase in the search engine. However, bear in mind that having the phrase in the title doesn’t mean that the site is a competitor. You can’t really know for sure unless you check the backlinks for that web page. If anchor texts for that page is similar to or exactly the same as the target keyword phrase, then you may have a serious competitor. You can try using a Firefox plugin (free) to obtain the information, or use special SEO software.

2) Your keywords.

Many marketers are confused as to which keywords to target. Let’s say you are in the “make money” niche. So should you target “Make Money” or “Make Money Online”? Of course, it’s always easier to rank for “Make Money Online”, so that should be a better choice to start. It is immensely difficult to rank for general keywords because of the great number of competitors. Also, the traffic may not be as targeted as you like because the phrase may be too general.

3) The quality of your back links.

Your back links should ideally come from authority sites. These are domains that are well established on the Internet and their links count a lot. In other words, it’s much easier to rank if you acquire links from these authority sites.

So how do you find authority sites?

Go to your favorite search engine and enter your target keyword phrase. Usually, authority sites rank well in the search results. The second to third page results should give you an indication of the authority of the websites. Also, you may want to rely on other indicators such as Google Page Rank or Alexa Rankings. But bear in mind that none of these indicators are 100% accurate. However, you can rely on them as general guides.

You will only be able to arrive at a reasonably accurate answer only when you have the above information at your finger tips.
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