If you’re just beginning your Internet marketing career online as a home based business owner one of your first priorities should be getting your website ranked by the major search engines on the web. Getting ranked means when people are conducting a search, with Google for example, for a topic related to your website theme your site turns up in the search engine results. Of course the higher your website is ranked the more traffic will be directed to your home page which will ultimately increase your sales and profits.
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website to improve your overall ranking within the major search engines online by researching the best keywords to place in strategic locations on your home page in order to attract the search engines attention. You can then work at improving your ranking by increasing the number of quality backlinks to your website which will increase your traffic and your sales.
There are many very effective SEO techniques and tactics available on the web and also several invaluable free tools you can use to help improve your website’s overall ranking online including, but not limited to, these 5 devices:
1. Perhaps the best known and most widely used of these free resources is Google’s adwords keyword research tool. This instrument tells you how many times the phrase you type in has been searched for online during a month, on average, as well as suggests alternative keyword phrases you can use.
Before optimizing your website for a certain set of keywords you must determine whether or not people are searching for these words online. If you optimize your site with phrases no one is using in their searches you will receive very little traffic directed to your home page from the search engines.
2. Wordtracker is another free keyword suggestion tool you can utilize in your optimization strategy. After entering your keyword phrase in this device it will generate a list of 100 related keywords and give you an estimation of the number of searches that are conducted on a daily basis for these phrases.
Because none of these instruments are totally accurate you would be wise to use more than one of these tools in your keyword research in order to gauge the most popular responses.
3. Another very effective device you can employ is called the link popularity checker. This apparatus allows you to discover how many backlinks your website has in place as well as telling you how many of these links you’ve established within the major search engines online such as Google and Yahoo.
One of the biggest influences on your overall ranking within the search engines is the number of backlinks you have on your home page so, of course, the more of these links you have the better your ranking will be for certain searched for phrases.
You simply enter your website address into the window of the tool and it will generate a report telling you how many backlinks you have in these search engines. This is also a great way to discover how many of these links your competition has online.
4. A fourth SEO technique you can use to attract the search engines attention is to create a site map for your home page. A site map contains links to each and every page on your site and by using a sitemap generation tool you can create a map in either html or xml format which you can upload to your website.
This device helps ensure that the search engines find all of your pages on the web which helps improve your overall ranking. You use this tool by simply entering your URL into the window and your website’s site map will be generated automatically.
5. Finally, a fifth free tool you can utilize to help improve your search engine ranking is the keyword rank checker. This instrument allows you to discover where you’re ranked within Google for a particular keyword phrase. Of course the higher your ranking within Google the more traffic you will see on your website because most of the traffic is delivered to websites listed on the first page of the search results.
For this reason your goal should be to get ranked on Google’s first page. You simply enter your URL into the window of this device as well as your keyword phrase and the checker will generate a report describing your ranking for this phrase.
SEO is a very important component for any Internet marketing strategy and how well you’re ranked within the major search engines online could ultimately determine the overall success or failure of your home based business on the web.