After establishing a great website, however, you need to drive interested consumers to your site in order for it to have an impact on your business bottom line. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can be useful in bringing more targeted customers to your business website and SEO can help improve the conversion rates as well. Conversions are interpreted differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers or e-commerce websites, a successful conversion may mean the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download or other activity.

All commercial websites can increase their ROI by focusing on the following:

• Increasing Relevant Traffic to the Website
• Increasing Conversions

A long term SEO plan to generate organic traffic from Search Engines is the most important because it is Google and the other major search engines that are the portals of choice when seeking specific information.

What is ROI and how can it be Improved?

Return On Investment (ROI) is a direct relationship between the total amount you spend and the total amount you earn from a certain internet marketing campaign.

Generally speaking, Return On Investment (ROI) is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment and to compare the efficiency of one investment to the other or over a certain period of time.

The two most important factors to improve your Return On Investment (ROI) are:

• Professional Search Engine Optimization
• Website Conversion Rate Optimization

Let’s understand these in detail.

Professional Search Engine Optimization is probably one of the best internet marketing strategies to improve your Return On Investment. Basically, the idea here is to generate lot of organic traffic which will simply give much more exposure to the website for a long period of time. Once the initial cost of Search Engine Optimization services is paid, you do not need to pay much money to keep the achieved results.

A good Search Engine Optimization campaign can contain the following items or a carefully selected combination:

• Keyword research, analysis and selection
• Copywriting the main website pages and the landing pages
• Link building exercise to improve the link popularity
• Social Media Marketing to create more brand loyalty

On the other hand, Website Conversion Rate Optimization is a technique to increase your Conversion Rate, which leads to more targeted visitors and more sales from your targeted traffic.

A good Website Conversion Rate Optimization campaign can contain the following:

• Find the Unique Selling Points (USP) and make them clear and obvious in the website and landing pages
• Improve the website design to be more search engine friendly
• Improve the website usability and accessibility to make navigation and finding information, products or services easier
• Improve the content on the website to clearly present the benefits of products or services to be more convincing and compelling to your visitors
• Improve landing pages to accurately match your advertising campaigns and the keywords used in them
• Track the campaigns and analyze results to improve performance

Hosting Your Blog
Many resources are available which allows one to host a blog for free but I strongly recommend investing in to a good domain name and hosting service to run the blog from your own domain. Initially, it may be a good idea to host the site on a free service provider, but eventually it should all be moved over to your own domain name.

Formating the Title Tags
Nothing goes far then a good formatted and descriptive Title tag. Try avoiding the blog name or your personal name in the title – do not waste the valuable space. Try and format the title such that they directly relate to the post that you have written as that would increase the overall importance of the page from the perspective of the search engines. Ensuring that you have good title tags is important while you are building up your blog readership as it is the search engines which are going to send you readers.

Post Often - Post Valuable Content
The more frequently you post valuable and feature rich posts, the more the bots and spiders will fall in love with your site. Search engines love fresh sites and fresh content and so it really makes sense to feed these content hungry bots and spiders with what they want. Posting something which is really valuable is like a cherry on the cake.

Rewrite URL Structure
Most of the blogging platforms allow you to tweak the URL structure. Go ahead and get a URL rewriting plug-in such that the URL does not show up like http://www.yourwebsite.com/?p=2 but something like http://www.yoursite.com/this-is-a-good-url-structure. The later one is a search engine friendly URL and it would also be a good resource to stick in some keywords.

Build Links
Yes, invest time in link building. Link to relevant sites and request them to link back to you. If you are blogging about a book or a story or a movie for that matter, link to the original web site. To add more value to links, format your link name such that it acts as a keyword. For example, lets assume that we are writing about Wolfram Alpha and you want to direct users to that post. Instead on hyperlinking on a word like “click here” use something like “Wolfram|Alpha: First Impressions“. Trust me, this has more weight and importance.

RSS Feeds
Don’t ask me the full form of RSS as it has changed many names. Way back in 1999 it stood for Rich Site Summary and was later dropped and given Really Simple Syndication as a new name. Remember that more and more RSS services are discovering feeds and indexing the content. Now that you have optimised the site, go out and spread the word.

We all know that the Internet is numero uno when it comes to finding information. People across the globe are using the Internet to get ideas about products, compare prices, perform online banking, make purchases, etc. There are millions of web sites in this virtual world and people basically use keywords to get relevant information. When a search is performed on the search engine and if your web site is not listed in the search, it clearly means that you do not exist on the Internet. Why? Because the search engine results did not list your website and so people do not know about you. If you are still under the impression that once your web site is uploaded, people will find you – you are mistaken and its time to rewind and give this perception a kick.

So what does it take to get popular? How can we assure that people find us? The answer is simple – make search engines fall in love with your website. Here are some basic list of items that you can handle on your own to start with:

Title Tags: The title is what we see in the top left corner of our browser window. The title tag is one of the most important factor in achieving high search engine rankings. Ensure that the title tag provides as much detail as possible about your web site. Do not stuff the title tag with irrelevant information. Instead pick out relevant keywords from the web site content and put those keywords in the title.

URL: The URL is basically your web site address. For example, my website URL is http://www.vishalvasu.com. But if you are reading this post from a link, you will notice a longer URL. See how the URL is seperated by hyphes? It basically has keywords stuffed in there as I’ve planned by page name and directory structure to accomodate that. Again, do not overdo this as there are chances that search engine may penalize your web site.

Relevant Content: Playing around with keywords, title tags, etc. simply does not help until you have relevant content on your website to support the same. Remember – Content is the King. Make use of the right amount of keywords (keyword density), use few images and provide ALT tags for images as search engines cannot read images, make use of H1, H2 and H3 tags in the content. Generally the more useful, interesting and relevant content a website has the more successful it will be.

Periodic Updates: Search engines like fresh and new content. Not adding anything new to the web sites at regular intervals means stale content and search engines will lose all interest in your site. Think up of ideas to share product information, announcement of some weekly specials, news postings, newsletter marketing, blogging, etc. Periodic updates act like a good deo and attract the search engines towards your site.

Link Building: Search engines while indexing your web site look for other web sites which link to your web site. This way they try and build up the importance which in professional terms is called “ranking”. Try trading links with other websites which have similar or supporting content to your web site. For example, if your web site is selling gift articles, trading links with an online flower shop site could be benefical. Also, try and write some unique articles and submit them on the Internet to gain one-way backlinks. There is nothing as valuable as a one-way backlink from a high ranking web site.

Site Submission: Go ahead and submit your web site to search engines and directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, Google, etc. Also, try and submit to lot of relevant business directories on the Internet. There is lot of hidden benefit to this.

That being said, hopefully you should be able to get some good traffic.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

Well, everyone wants their web site in good listing but not many achieve it. This is mainly because many of them fail to consider how search engines work and that’s what Search Engine Optimization is all about. Basically, we have three main things to do after a web site has been designed:

[1] Search Engine Optimization

[2] Search Engine Marketing

[3] Maintaining the Good Listing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be termed as an active practice of optimizing a web site by improving its aspects such that search engines simply fall in love with it. The majority of web traffic is driven by major search engines – Yahoo!, MSN, Google and AskJeeves. Now, if your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search – people who want what you have visiting your site.

I know what you are thinking. Why can’t the Search Engine index my web site with doing any optimization? Well, let’s answer it this way. Assume that you go to a library and ask the librarian to give you a book on “travel”. Obviously, the librarian is going to come back to you asking for more information on what kind of travel – adventure, holiday’s abroad, wildlife, etc.

Now let’s go back to our electronic age librarian – search engine. The moment we put in a word like travel and hit the search button, the search engine does not ask us questions. It digs out all the information and presents it to us – though it may put in suggestions at the top or bottom of the search results. This is popularly know as “keywords” and the search engines will check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page.

Each keyword has two main aspects – keyword relevancy to the content on the page and the keyword density. If this is not maintained properly and the use of the keywords is not justified, the web site is penelized. In short, now we know that keyword optimization is part of Search Engine Optimization.

Another aspect is the use of Title tags on the web page. A title is the heading that we see on the top of our browser’s left corner window. Changing your page titles is not necessarily going to help the page to do well for your target keywords if the page has nothing to do with the topic. Keywords and Title need to be reflected in the page content and that too at proper density.

Apart, from these, SEO involves web page content writing, sitemap building, HTML link building and rewriting, meta tags generation, description tag generation, valid HTML use, etc. There is lot of work and analysis involved and it takes up lot of time. The worst part is that we cannot actually see what “ACTUAL” results we are going to achieve unless an until the search engines have re-indexed the updated web pages.

Search engine optimization can be vital to a business because 90% of all online traffic is achieved through the various search engines. Therefore, knowing how to properly market your company through search engine optimization is virtually the only way to be found on the expansive Internet.

The next time you are on the Internet, search for your own site or your own name and see the results. Do not perform the search using your own business or persoanl name. You would be knowingthat and not others. Use generic keywords by which you think people should find your web site. See for yourself where and on which page of the search engine are you listed or for that matter, are you listed at all?

To summarize, search engine optimization is the tool that can ensure that your site will be listed within relevant search results, and as close as possible to the top 10 or top 20 listings for specific keywords.

Ignoring SEO is like a shop without any sign board, display window, business name or postal address. Potential customers will walk past your shop, not even realizing you are there. In the next parts I will cover Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and then in the future would be posting tips and articles on my web site on how to perform basic SEO and SEM.