SEO is the process of configuring a website so that it has a chance to show up in a search result for a particular keyword phrase. It is your way of telling search engines what you think your site is about. Each search engine has a slightly different formula for how they determine the results of a webpage.

Why is SEO Important?
One word sums it up – competition. As many as 20 billion web pages are being indexed at any given time. To stand out from the crowd, it is absolutely critical to make sure you are using every tool to make sure your customers can find you when they are looking for your products and services.

So why don’t more people do SEO?
SEO is a PROCESS, not a one-time event. It is detail oriented, time consuming and requires regular ongoing efforts in order to maintain results. SEO is one piece of a complete overall online marketing strategy.

Simple guidelines that you can control for best long-term SEO results:

• Good site structure – The bottom line is that if you can’t easily navigate a site without problems chances are the search engines can’t either and you have no chance of ranking for your key phrase.
• Good meta-data – Simply geek-speak for the code behind the scenes that search engines use to understand the web page.
• Good relevant content- Visitors understand that good relevant content is really what they are looking for when they searched with a keyword phrase.  Websites appear higher in the search results generally have regular updates or blogs versus sites with older, stale content on them.

Long and short is that competitive space for search engine optimization is becoming further and further from a free venue. As more and more people compete for key terms, affordable SEO becomes a pay-to-play space. Sure there are things you can do to help improve search engine ranking, but the reality is that those who pay for online advertising, or those who hire full-time writers for their website will usually come out on top.
Traffic is one of the key components of your web site marketing strategy and is available in these three forms.

1. Borrow It. One method of borrowing traffic is called link exchange. This is where you put links to another website on your site and they put links back to you on theirs. The key thing to remember about borrowing traffic is that you have to give something in return.

2. Develop It. Articles are a great way of generating traffic. Once you have created your articles you can put them on your website or blog as content, a white paper, or eBook.

3. Pay For It. You can buy traffic typically using what is known as Pay-Per-Click advertising. You can define your target markets, your daily budget, and where you want your online ads to appear. Paid search marketing offers one of the best ways to control traffic to your website .

There are many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants that will charge you an arm and a leg for their services, sometimes as much as $2,000 per month or more. They often make dubious claims that they can get you ranked on the first page of the search engines within a few months, and if not, they will kindly refund your money.

However, there is a catch. Once you pay the initial deposit and the SEO company begins working on your site, they will often optimize your website in such a manner so that you will be able to quickly rise to the top of the rankings for a keyword that is either not significant or will not attract any real traffic.

If you want to improve your ranking and attract qualified traffic to your website, you need to use a different approach:

1. Optimize your website for the keywords or phrases that people actually use when searching for products or services related to what you offer.
2. Modify higher volume keywords and search terms with phrases that are more specific to your services and industry.
3. Localize your keywords to your target market and client’s location.
4. Try to have a decent amount of free content on your website that relates to the keywords or phrases for which you want to be ranked higher.

Last month we discussed how to use consistent content building to improve your search engine rankings. Step #1 covered the importance of quality content because quality content on your site gives search engines the understanding that you are a destination for information and knowledge. What do you do next?

Step #2 – Keep it fresh.

The wide open web is ever expanding and constantly growing, is your website growing as well? Every day thousands of new sites launch, and that means fresh competitors presenting information in new and interesting ways. Content freshness helps web sites as it offers the benefit for users to have a look at new and useful information. Keeping your web site fresh is worth the extra effort, with the addition of new content; your website is adding value to the end users. While the “freshness factor” is very important to search engines like Google, what’s even more important is that your website continues to grow through content building. If you have not read your website’s content in the past few months, take a closer look. Is it still representing your company in the way that you think it should?

Ranking with the search engines for local markets, requires a shift in marketing the big three search engines for global traffic. If your service is not global, then do not dilute your SEO efforts from targeted local online markets.

Your #1 goal is to use localized target keywords. Actual localized keywords will bring you a steady stream of natural traffic through local search.

Here are the steps involved for successful optimization in local markets.

1. Localize your target keywords. This includes prefixing or suffixing local terms, names, and names of areas, cities or zip codes with target keywords.

2. Make sure your website is submitted to local search engines, directories and web based yellow pages.

3. Display your mailing address with street address, zip code and complete. Once your site is indexed, these words gain prominence as a part of content.