When
I first started selling online, the first major problem I
ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads
on other sites, organized reciprocal links and joined web
rings. Those methods
all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me,
what turned my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber,
was figuring out how to use search engines.
Sure, I’d submitted my sites to the major search engines
as soon as I’d finished building them, but I didn’t
really pay them much attention. After all, I figured search
engines are just for people who are looking for information;
they’re not really good for commercial sites.
Boy, was I wrong! One day, I sat down and checked out which
sites were popping up first in the categories that suited
my businesses. I found that all the top-ranked sites were
my biggest competitors. And when I say biggest, I mean these
guys were in a whole other league. They had
incomes that were ten or twenty times the size of mine. No
wonder they had top billing at Yahoo! And then it clicked.
Search engines don’t list sites by size, they list them
by relevance. These sites weren’t listed first because
they were big; they were big because they were listed first!
That was when I began to optimize my pages and think about
meta-tags and keywords. As my sites rose through the listings,
my traffic went through the roof. And not just any old traffic!
The people
that came to my sites from search engines hadn’t just
clicked on a banner by accident or followed a link from curiosity,
they’d actually been looking for a site like mine. My
sales ratio went up like a rocket.
I’d created my own big break.
In this chapter, we are going to discuss all proven strategies
of search engine optimization. We will discuss how to optimize
your site, submit your pages and pick up the targeted traffic
you need to make cash. This chapter is one of the most important
chapters in the whole book. It’s crucial that you read
it carefully.
Let’s start with search engines.
How
search engines work
Top
search engines
Search
engine page-ranking algorithms
Keywords
— optimizing your site to get top billing at search
engines
Web
copy for seo
Submitting
to search engines
Search
directories – the benefits of browsing
Pay-per-click
— buying status
Link
popularity and link analysis
Optimizing
your website
Monitoring
your progress
Three
words about spam |