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How to kick start your business with SEO & SEM
Who is this for?
If you are a webmaster who is about to start his/her first
online business or web site, you probably know that it is not
that easy to get high traffic to your site. In fact, nowadays it
takes a lot more work to be successful online, than it had been
some years ago. The main factor that influences your success is
that most business or web site owner do not know anything
(useful) about search engine optimization (SEO) and/or search
engine marketing (SEM). These terms are wide-spread, however, a
lot of people just know of it as a way to get ranked high in the
search engines.
There are tons of webmasters and web site owners who would like
to know more about SEO strategies in order to kick start their
business. If you have enough funds to hire a SEO company to do
the promotional work for you, you would probably not sift
through the internet and find out more about SEO, unless you are
eager to learn more and more. So this article is mainly for
those who start out with SEO and want to know more about the
strategies to not only rank high in the search engines, but also
prosper and do well in satisfying visitors or prospects.
Why do I need SEO & SEM to rank high?
The question is why businesses and web sites do need to promote
their web sites well these days, unlike some years ago, when
everyone was about to submit to a few of the established
directories and was seeing an increase in traffic through
spreading the word. The answer is: A few things have changed.
The search engines have developed very complex algorithms in
order to find relevant web sites and separate them from the
non-relevant web sites. These algorithms are quite complicated
and not revealed to anybody outside of the search engines.
The problem is that, in order to reach high ranking and traffic,
you need to prove your web site to be trustworthy and relevant
for the world. Relevance can be reached through search engine
optimization, whereas trustworthiness is reached through the
marketing and promotion of your web site to other relevant and
related web sites. There are theories about a so-called sandbox
or trustbox that is used by Google, however, they have never
been confirmed to be existing to 100%. This sandbox theory
claims that every new web site is put in a box for a specified
probation period. While in the box
the site is not ranked well
and does not receive a PageRank. The trustbox theory claims that
the probation period is more likely to be defined by trusted and
relevant back links.
Whether one of these theories is real or not, fact is that you
need to optimize your business for the search engines and then
promote it. The main thought is that you should try to gain as
many one-way links as possible. One-way links, also referred to
as inbound links, are link that are directed to your site
without your site to be linking back to that site. In past the
so-called reciprocal links have been wide-spread in order to
build your linking and prove your trustworthiness and/or
relevance. However, these days, one-way links are more than
appreciated and worth it!
How to approach? How to gain one-way links and kick start my
business now?
This is a very complex topic and it is impossible to tell you
about any existing and proved strategy at once. Nevertheless
there are some easy but time consuming ways to kick start your
business or web site. Before everything can begin, however, you
should first optimize your website. There are some resources on
the internet that tell you about optimization etc.
After you are done with it, promote your web site to (free) web
directories first. Web directories provide you with one-way
links without the need to link back to them. Well, in fact there
are a lot of directories that require reciprocal links back, but
these are not the ones you should submit to. Submit to SEO
friendly free web directories first, apart from the Open
Directory Project/DMOZ. Then after you have done this exhausting
work, write quality articles and spread them. Be active in
forums. Publish a blog relating to your area and regularly write
in it to attract readers and prospects. These are one of the
main sources for getting your first traffic and back links,
which raise your PageRank.
Now go on and find out about the variety of mistakes you can do
while optimizing and promoting like Over Optimization.
About the author:
Sebastian is the webmaster of Web
Site Search Engine Optimization, the site about common SEO
mistakes, free SEO training and techniques, as well as a
regularly updated list of free, paid and niche web directories.
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