Yes, you should use Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Just a few things you should know first.

​If you are in business, most likely you have a website. If you don't have one, you know that you need one. Let's just assume that you have a website (since we already established that you need one), now you need a plan to get people to visit your website. There are many ways to get to the end result of boat loads of visitors to your site. However, one of the most efficient techniques is making your web site more visible to search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what we are referring to and this article contains some SEO advice that you may use to increase your visibility on the web. You may be thinking... why is this important? Well, the websites that dominate the search engines organically or naturally, usually get the most traffic. You may be thinking... why is that important? Well, the website that gets the most traffic has a better shot at turning that traffic into paying customers that can't wait to hand you their money. 

First things first, content is king! You want to make sure that you have unique content on your site. This means no cut & paste cookie cutter information. You want to make sure your information is not found anywhere else on the web. Search engines "crawl" all of the content on your site to determine how relevant it is. They also check to make sure the content is original. If you use streaming media on your site like audio clips or videos (which I highly encourage for reasons I'll explain in another post), make sure you include transcripts of the content so the search engines know how to rank your content. Implementing this strategy can help improve your rankings on the search engines. The more unique, authoritative content that your site provides, the better.

If you want to farm your SEO out to a third party, make sure that they can get you the results that they promise. Depending on what you need to accomplish, it may take an upfront investment to implement high level SEO strategies so finding the best price is not necessarily the best factor to base your decision on. Also, you don't want to hire someone that is too cheap. Often times this is a clear indication that they are amateurs and most likely will not provide quality work. This will prove to be a waste of time and money. The last thing you want to do is waste time because SEO does not happen overnight. You should expect to go into a long term relationship with your new SEO consultant. They should be able to produce visible results within 60-90 days depending on where you are starting from. There are many questionable companies that say they provide internet marketing and SEO consulting, but they do sloppy work. Red flags are apparent if they are not willing to educate their clients on the process or use language that is over their clients head to mask the techniques they are using. Serious SEO Companies that know what they are doing should be confident in their results enough to guarantee their work. Also, they should be able to describe the process in an easy to understand way so you know what you are paying for. While SEO work isn't cheap, it is necessary and if you select the correct company, your bottom line will thank you.

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Think about what your potential customer might type into a search engine to find your website, integrate many of those keywords and phrases into your relevant content, that will increase the chances that they find you. You want to use them strategically in both the titles and the content, but like I said earlier be careful not to over saturate your website with keywords. You don't want to get tagged as being a possible spam site.

​Increasing SEO can really be like watching paint dry. It is definitely a game of patience. There really isn't anything sexy about it. You will not see immediate results, you will most likely see gradual increases in the traffic to your website. Especially if you have a brand spanking new website, the optimization process may takes months for results to show. Online business and offline business are very similar. Either way, it is going to take some time to build up your visibility on the web so your ideal customers can see how awesome your business is.

Another key to great rankings are the number of quality links to your site. Make sure that the links coming into your website, as well as internal links within your site, use keyword phrases as anchor text. Using keywords is essential to rank higher in search engine results but if you saturate your page with keywords, it may hurt your rankings. However, you definitely want search engine spiders to recognize your relevant keywords, just be careful not to over do it. Check your site twice to make sure that the internal links have properly related keywords in their anchor text.

Keep in mind search engines use algorithms and they change quite often, and everything that works now probably will not work forever. As a result, you should always try to stay up to date with the latest changes in the search engine optimization industry or hire an SEO expert in order to ensure that your website keeps dominating the search rankings like a boss.