Getting website traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo has to be part of your Internet marketing plan mainly for three reasons:

1. It is high quality traffic. (After all, these visitors searched using your best keywords!)

2. With good ranking you can get a lot of this traffic passively.

3. It’s free! I’ve received literally millions of visitors from search engines over the years.

This article will show you how to start your own flow of traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It all starts with a little SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It consists of strategies to help your web pages rank better in the search engine results pages (serps) for a particular search word or phrase.

SEO can be a complicated subject which is why there are so many freelance consultants and internet marketing companies offering SEO services. Some of them are quite expensive, charging thousands of dollars to get a site ranked in the top ten for your particular niche keywords.

However, if you are running on a tight budget and can’t afford to hire a professional, you can do SEO yourself. Just follow the nine SEO strategies below. Most of it is fairly simple, it just takes time.

(When building new sites, I like to do everything myself except steps 7 & 8 below which I prefer to outsource.)

1. Choose Your Keywords Wisely

When you are planning your website’s content, you should do some research about which keywords to use. Keywords are the search terms that people use to find websites in search engines. Think carefully about your target audience and consider what they might type into a search engine when they are looking for websites like yours.

You can use tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to help you with your research. When you are starting out, aim to have a list of five keyword phrases that you will optimize your website for. Once you are ranking well for these five, you can add more keywords to the list.

When using the Google Keyword tool, use the “exact match” option so you know how many people are searching for the exact terms you’re researching. The best keyword phrases to optimize for are keyword phrases with 1500 – 5000 monthly searches. Those keywords usually have just enough searches to be profitable, but not so many that the competition is too stiff to outrank.

2. Use Your Keywords in the Title Tags of Your Web Pages

A web page’s title tag is one of the most important factors for how that page will rank in the search engines. Each page at your site should use a title tag that matches the search term you’re trying to get the page ranked for. This is especially important at your main page. The title tag should also describe the content of the page in a concise and accurate manner. This helps the search engines decide how relevant the page is to a particular search term. The more relevant a page is, the higher it will rank in the results for that search term.

3. Use Your Keywords in Your Domain Name

I’ve done a lot of research on this and even though not everyone agrees, I have found clear evidence that websites with exact match domains get top ranking easier than non-keyword domain sites. In other words, once you know your best keyword phrase for your niche, see if you can get the domain name that matches that phrase exactly. Go for .com then .net, then .org. If none of them are available, use a hyphen (-) between your best keywords.

4. Use Your Keywords in the HTML Heading Tags

Heading tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.) give the search engines more info about how relevant the web page is to certain search terms. Make sure to use heading tags containing your keywords at each page of your site. As a bare minimum, every web page should have one H1 tag that includes the same keywords that are in your title tag.

5. Check the Keyword Density in Your Website Text

The number of times your keywords appear in the text on your web page or blog helps search engines match the content to the appropriate search terms. This is known as keyword density. How often keywords should be used is often debated among SEO experts. Some believe that stuffing a page with keywords is beneficial to search engine rankings, while others think that ‘keyword stuffing’ is viewed as a form of spam by the search engines. As a general rule, for a web page that has about 400-600 words of body content, use the main keyword once in the first paragraph, once in second paragraph, once in the last paragraph, and once somewhere in between.

6. Setup Your Website’s Internal Linking Structure Properly

When you are planning your website or blog, make sure you have at least one text link on every page that links to your main URL. The text link should contain your best keyword or keyword phrase. As your site grows in size, so will the number of web pages that point to your main page, increasing the popularity for that page based on your best keywords. Also, when adding blog posts at your blog, be sure to hyperlink to other posts on your blog when appropriate. (Each time you do this, be sure to use the keywords you’re working at getting ranked!)

7. Grow the Number of Incoming Links from a Wide Variety of External Sites

Of all the factors in SEO, one of the most important is the number of web pages that link to the target page you are trying to get ranked well. In other words, if site A and site B are virtually identical, site A will outrank site B if there are more web pages linking to site A.

Other factors that help are having a variety of links and multiple links from high PR sites. (PR stands for page rank, a weighted value Google gives to pages based on their authority.) If site A has links from a wide variety of places such as social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, niche blogs, web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hubpages, article directories, etc., it will outrank site B with the same number of links all from one source.

Of course getting lots of links to a site can be time consuming. That’s why you may want to outsource this task. You can do so at odesk.com, guru.com, elance.com and many other places. Just be sure to hire link builders with a good track record and lots of positive feedback. Also be sure to instruct them properly and let them know you need links from a wide variety of sources, and have them apply
strategies 8 and 9 below.

8. Grow the Number of Incoming Links From External Sites Slowly and Consistently

Don’t go too fast with your link building campaign. Getting a few dozen links a week or even 10 a day is OK, but if Google sees 1000 new incoming links to your site the next time they update their database, you’ll likely move down the serps, not up.

9. Use Your Keywords in as Many Incoming Links as Possible

While you don’t want all the links to your site to use the same keyword or keyword phrase, you do want to focus on using your best keyword or keyword phrase for most of your links. Remember, SEO is all about proper site setup and link building. If the top ranked web page at Google for your best search term has say, 200 incoming links, you can outrank that page when you get 201, provided you have all or most of the other strategies explained today in place as well.

In closing…

Internet marketing can be inexpensive if you do things like SEO and email marketing yourself.

If you use all of the SEO strategies shared in this article, you will improve your ranking in the search engines. Depending on the niche you’re in, you could go right to the top of the serps within a matter of months!

Get more do-it-yourself strategies like these from Jim Daniels at http://www.bizweb2000.com – he’s been making a living online since 1996 and can show you how to do it too.

SEO has been around more or less as long as there have been search engines. Although it seems like some blogger or another is heralding the impending death of SEO every few months or so, SEO has yet to fade into oblivion. The very core of SEO is to change; to make adjustments to one’s site to adapt to the search engines’ algorithms, the changes in consumers’ online behavior, the expanding online world and so forth. SEO isn’t about to die anytime soon, but it is constantly evolving to meet the needs and challenges of the times.

This is a look at SEO as it was in 2004 and how it has morphed to fit the modern world of 2011.

SEO: IT or Marketing Department?

Back in 2004, many marketing departments looked at SEO as a technology and not as a marketing tool. It was all about coding and web development and was often lumped in with other IT “stuff.” The singular goal of SEO was to get a site to rank number one in the search engines for a given keyword. Period. Now, SEO is tied in with every aspect of online marketing. SEO can be used to build a brand and online reputation, help create a community of targeted consumers, and more. Rank is no longer the principle focus, albeit still a very important result. Nowadays, SEO is squarely about marketing.

Linking Best Practices

Links were and continue to be the bread and butter of SEO. However, the way companies go about building inbound links has dramatically changed over time. In 2004, I was working for a large SEM firm. We had a full-time employee that was hired solely to develop link exchanges for our clients. Since then, link exchanges, paid links, spammy anchor text, cloaking, and the like have all been soundly labeled “black hat” by the search engines. Directory submissions were wildly popular in the early days of SEO, and while there are a few good ones left that can provide a quality link, they aren’t usually valuable for much else.

Nowadays, link building is synonymous with trust building. If you were to compare a very spammy, black hat site to a quality site, you would find that the spammy site (even if it has more links) is usually linked to/from other low quality sites. A website that is seen as an authority figure will have a much more diverse and valuable link portfolio, even if it is smaller. In 2004, quantity could trump quality. That is no longer the case for 2011.

Search Engines

Remember when AOL was King of the Internet? Now we all giggle at anyone who still actively uses the former giant. What about InfoSeek or AskJeeves? Do you still search using AltaVista? In the early days, the Internet was littered with various search engines, each with unique pros and cons. In 2004, Google was just one of many. Now, we use Google as a verb when we want someone to conduct a search. The general consensus of many SEO professionals is that when we optimize a company’s site, we are going after the Google SERP. Bing has been slowly chipping away at Google’s share of the search market, but for the most part Google is still the dominant player.

SEO Tools

Back in 2004, conducting keyword research was the single worst part of SEO. You couldn’t trust any data on search volume to be accurate, so in the end we pretty much had to guess. I remember sitting down with a thesaurus to come up with keyword variations! Good keyword research tools didn’t exist. Can you imagine optimizing each page of a 1,000 page website with no data to guide you? Luckily, today we have the Google Keyword research tool to make that task much easier and help streamline the process.

Google Analytics, a tool every responsible website owner should use, was only fully implemented in 2006! Before then, site owners had to buy analytics software or use a generic hit counter (which didn’t tell you anything much other than number of visitors) to monitor their site’s analytics. Nowadays, we don’t make any changes, big or small, to a website without first consulting our Google Analytics information. The information found there helps shape and adapt our SEO campaigns for the better, and we can make decisions knowing they will point us in the right direction.

Social Media and Sharing

Social media didn’t really exist in 2004. Facebook, the 800 pound gorilla of social networking sites, was barely operational in early 2004. We certainly didn’t have Twitter and LinkedIn. While smaller social networking sites did exist, social media as we know it really exploded in recent years. Back in 2004, if you wanted to connect with someone online, you sent them an e-mail or an IM message. Now we message, Tweet, post, share, Like, bookmark, and much more. Content gets passed from person to person at astonishing speeds. We can build relationships with people halfway around the world all thanks to social networking.

SEO has even begun to envelop social media. The search engines have started incorporating data from social networking sites into their algorithms to help organize search results. Suddenly, the information your friends used to share on Facebook or Twitter amongst yourselves is impacting the general search results.

Mobile

The first smartphone, a BlackBerry, was released in 2003. The concept that you could be connected to your e-mail wherever you went and without a computer was revolutionary. Suddenly the Internet was mobile. The subsequent iPhone releases and Android phones furthered our online connectivity, and now smartphones are dominating the cell phone market. Local search has become an increasingly important part of SEO, all because of mobile phones and tablets. Google Maps didn’t even exist in 2004, yet now we can search for an address and get directions on our GPS enabled mobile devices.

Consumers and companies alike want to be able to connect with each other on the go. Since we never have to disconnect from our online lives, mobile marketing has developed to allow companies to target consumers no matter where they are or what they are doing.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the changes that SEO has undergone, just in the last 7 years. But hopefully this has given you a better idea of just how much the game has changed. The next time you read a blog or article that says SEO is dead, remember that SEO doesn’t really die. It just evolves to meet the needs to the times.

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing a full-service Boston SEO firm that also offers social media marketing management services. With over 12 years of Internet marketing experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO tips to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-350-4365 or nick@brickmarketing.com