Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing is the art and science of gaining high search engine placement for search phrases that will attract your ideal prospects. For example, when someone searches for "the abundance course" we want them to find this site. And they do!

There are numerous opinions about how to do search engine optimization (SEO). This is for a variety of factors, but there are two that are primary:

1. The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms (the criteria used to rank a page).
2. Each search engine uses different variables that determine how "relevent" a page is.

I follow the advice of Brad Fallon, co-author of Stomping the Search Engines. I've heard Brad speak a couple of times and he's a smart guy. Besides that he can prove his theories true by showing number one placement of his web sites in very competitive markets.

Brad's approach to SEO is this:

Gain enough inbound links to your site to reach the top-10 search results, then worry about on-page optimization.

What's an Inbound Link?

An inbound link is a link on somebody elses web site that points to your site. There are three important factors when we talk about inbound links.

1. The popularity of the site linking to you; not all sites are equal in the eyes of the search engines. Google uses what is called "page rank" to determine this. The higher the page rank of a site, the more valuable that a link is from that site. A page rank of 5 is good. Anything above that is very good to great.

2. The number of links pointing to you. Although one link from a site with a PR7 is terrific, 50 links from a number of sites with lower PR is good too. The more links pointing to your site, the more "authoratative" your web site is considered.

3. The anchor text. This is EXTREMELY important. Anchor text are the words used in the link that points to your site. If you want to rank well for "holothink", then you want many links pointing to you with those words - for example holothink instead of http://www.holothink.com or click here

How to do an anchor text link? It's easy.

<a href="http://www.mysite.com">YOUR TEXT HERE</a>

It's important to vary the anchor text when doing link trades. You don't want every site pointing to yours to say "holothink"; instead you want "holothink audio program",etc. Attempt to get as many relevent keywords in your anchor text as possible, while eliminating irrelevent keyords.

The Most Efficient Ways to Get Links to You

1. Hire Someone on Rent-a-Coder.com; You can find people who will arrange link exchanges with you and pay them on a "per link" basis.

2. Article Submissions; Submit articles to article directories. Publishers of other web sites will use your writing on their sites.

3. SEO Elite. This is a piece of software I use that finds sites that do link exchanges, autotically fills out the forms and then creates a recipricol link page that you place on your site. I highly recommend this software to all do-it-yourselfers. What used to require hours of effort, I can now do in 20 minutes. Learn more about SEO Elite.

Search Engine Optimization,
Quick and Easy

1. Keyword Research

- Choose the RIGHT WORDS
- - Relevant to Your Offer
- - People are SEARCHING FOR IT!
o https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Offsite Optimization

- Number of inbound links (sites that link to you)
- Quality of the sites those links appear on
- What the links, the anchor text, says

3. Onsite Optimization

A. Include exact keywords you want placement for it your page title. Eliminate non-essential words, characters and phrases people are not likely to search for.

Example:
YES - "Sedona Arizona Real Estate Agent"
NO - "sedonarealestate.com - John Barker is a swell guy meeting all your needs"

B. Include keywords in page names and directories.

YES - sedonarealestate.com/FSBO/for-sale-by-owner.html
NO - sedonarealestate.com/dir1/page23.html

C. Use H1 and H2 tags for headlines; use at least 2 headlines.

D. Include primary keywords in both headlines.

E. Include keywords in every paragraph, at least once.

F. Linking within your site, use text links that include important keywords that describe that page.

YES - Sedona Real Estate Listings
NO - Click here for info

G. Use similar guidelines for images - ie, sedona-arizona-home.jpg instead of pic3.jpg and use alt tags that accurately describe the image, utilizing keywords.

H. Most important pages, only, should link directly from home page. Use a site map for other pages.

4. Other factors

- With SE's in mind, learn to view your site upside down; a funnel that feeds your home page, not a home page that feeds the rest.
- META Tags (for more on metatags, click here)
- - Description
- - Tag that tells SE's to spider and index "all" - <meta name="robots" content="all">
- robots.txt file (upload this file, as-is, to your main site directory - ie, public_html)

5. Only Search Engines that Really Matter

- Google (Most important factors: Offsite factors and page title)
- Yahoo (Most important factors: Currently shifting, balance of offsite/onsite)
- MSN (Most important factors: Primarily onsite factors - easiest to get placement on right now)

What do I need to know about metatags?

In general, they are no longer relevant to SEO
because so many people abused the use of them.

Here are the tags I include in my sites - and I
recommend you do too. You can copy and paste
them into your HTML document right BELOW your
title tag.

------------------
<html>
<head>
<title>Holothink</title>

</head>
------------------

These are what I use on all of my sites - you want
to replace the CAP text with your words. The 'allow search'
and 'robots' tags are important because they tell the search
engines to follow all links and index all pages on your site.

All Information in this Affiliate Training Center is Property of John R. Barker
It is for Holothink Affiliate Use ONLY
Unauthorized Distribution is Prohibited by U.S. Law
© John R. Barker, 2005