Why You Should Include SEO in Your Internet Marketing Strategy

By Rodney Brooks, on June 7th, 2009

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered a critical element of any Internet marketing strategy.

It is important because there is so much to be gained from SEO in terms of Internet marketing and advertising. Failure to optimize your website for the search engines, can result in a considerable loss of the free advertising gained from ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

This article will provide some insight into what SEO is, and will explain why Internet marketing requires it – at least to some degree.

Search engine optimization is a strategy in which a website is designed to obtain favorable search engine rankings from popular search engines. This may be achieved in a variety of different ways and optimal SEO strategies combine a variety of different strategies to complete one well orchestrated campaign.

There are several elements to consider when attempting to optimize your website for search engines.

These elements include, but are not limited to – keyword density, prominence, META tags, titles and inbound links.

Keyword density is one of the most common SEO strategies and essentially involves using the right amount of relevant keywords (usually around 1-3%) in the content of a website to demonstrate the relevance of those keywords to the website. This is important because search engines are likely to reward websites with optimal keyword densities, with favorable search engine rankings.

This is one formula they use to provide Internet users with the most relevant websites for particular search terms.

The prominence of keywords should also be considered. This includes how close the keywords are placed to the beginning of the website.

The most common mistake with this strategy is to believe that the first opportunity to incorporate keywords is in the first line of visible text on the webpage. This is not true because search engines crawl the code of a website as opposed to the visible content on the website. This means that there are multiple opportunities to incorporate relevant keywords long before the actual visible content on the website.

This might include the code for the TITLE as well as the META tags.

Business owners who realize the potential for incorporating keywords into the code gain an advantage over competitors who only incorporate keywords into the content on their website.

Another area of concern which is very important is inbound links.

Inbound links are essentially links which reside on other websites and direct traffic to your website. These links are considered important because many search engines place a value on inbound links because they are essentially an example of one website recommending another website. However, when obtaining inbound links it is important to do so from other websites which rank well with search engines.

Many search engines consider the page rank of the original website when determining the value of the inbound link.

Now that we have briefly explained some of the main concepts of SEO, we will illustrate why it is important to optimize your website in the first place.

Search engine optimization is so important because most Internet users highly value the results of search engines and are likely to only visit high ranking websites when they search for a particular keyword.

Internet users trust the SERPS, to serve the most relevant content first and are therefore not likely to visit websites which do not fall on the first or second page of search results. This means websites which rank well, are essentially receiving a great deal of free advertising from the search engines that place their website in a key position.

Website owners who do not invest time into optimizing their websites, miss out on a great deal of potential web traffic. – www.affiliatenetworkssites.blogspot.com

Interested in learning More?

Check out my Free Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Videos page.

You’ll learn how to do keyword research, how to do on page search engine optimization, how to create a search engine friendly site architecture & brand, how to build links to your website and so much more. There’s even a Free 7 day SEO course.