Wedding SEO and Internet Marketing Blog

There are many search engine optimization businesses on the internet.  Many of them make false claims, by guaranteeing that they will take your website to number one in the search engine results pages.  When an seo firm promises that they can take your site to number one in the search engines without seeing any information from your site, that should go up as a red flag.  There are some niches where it is virtually impossible to get to number one in the search results.  Also, ask the companies when you can expect to start seeing results from their seo campaign.  SEO campaigns do not get immediate results.  Many of them take as long as 3-4 months before you can expect to start seeing results from their work.  So be skeptical if the seo firm says that you will begin seeing results immediately.  Maybe a few visitors will start trickling in to your website, but there will not be any substantial gains in traffic for at least a few weeks.  Ask the company what type of methods they plan on using while improving the seo of your site.  A great seo firm will have an array of methods, maybe even too many to implement on just your campaign.  You need to be able to see if your seo campaign is working out.  The company should provide some kind of tracking information.  Many of the companies provide a weekly report.  There should be some way provided to see exactly how well the seo campaign is panning out for your business.  Make sure to be familiar with the fees that are implemented by the company.  They should be able to provide you with a rate sheet, which will inform you about any expenses you may encounter while using their service.

Many of these seo firms provide the basic tasks that you and I can easily do ourselves.  Sure, they may know some advanced techniques that will help get your site indexed.  However, at the end of the day, your search engine ranking page results really hinges on whether or not your site has quality, keyword-enriched content.  Many of these businesses are focused on new website owners that are having trouble getting traffic to the website.  These people are desperate and will do anything in order to get some visitors to their websites.

With the amount of information available on the internet, I recommend doing your own seo.  Sure you can always outsource a few simple tasks to other people, but there is plenty information available on the internet to get a good grasp of what needs to be done in order to optimieze your website for the search engines.  Do not  forget, that content is king.  These seo firms do not have a magic wand that they simply wave, resulting in your page climbing to the top of the search engines.  In order to help your website climb the search engines, these firms will have to put in a great amount of work, just as it would be if you were doing the seo work for your website for yourself.  Really, it comes down to a simple question.  Is it worth saving your time in order to have someone else do the seo work necessary to make your business successful.  If the time you would be spending on seo can be better spent doing other more useful tasks that need to be done for your company, then by all means hire an seo firm.

One of the key benefits of an seo firm is the tweaks that they will be able to make on the actual website layout.  Not only are they supposed to get you to the top of Google, they are supposed to help you point your traffic in the right direction once it gets there.  If you want visitors to check out your rates for your wedding DJ service, they should be able to make adjustments to the website’s layout in order to get the people going where you want them to.  This makes it very important to find an seo firm that is very familar with web design.  When asking the seo firm what they provide for you, it is important to see if they discuss anything changing the layout of your site in order to create more conversions.  This is one of the main benefits of a great seo firm.

When you create your own blog with WordPress, there is usually an icon on your page that says “RSS” on the page somewhere.  This is an abbreviation for really simple syndicate.  People can subscribe to your RSS feed.  When they do, they get a feed each time you update your page.  This is a great way to keep your customers or readers updated to what is going on with your business.  If you offer specials each week, this is a great way to get them to your customers.

There are a lot of things you can do with your RSS feed.  You can submit your feed to RSS directories.  This way, each time your site is updated, it is automatically submitted to directories, creating quality backlinks.  You can also use your RSS feed to create fresh content at your Squidoo pages.  In Squidoo, there is a module where you can add an RSS feed to your lens.  You do this and put in the web address of your feed.  Then once a day, it automatically checks your RSS feed to see if there is any fresh content.  If there is, it automatically puts the title of the new articles on your Squidoo page.  This is a great way to get fresh content to your page on a daily basis.  This fresh content helps keep your Squidoo high in the search engines.

When building links, there are DoFollow and NoFollow links.  A DoFollow link is a link that a search engine will acknowledge as a link back to your site.  A NoFollow is a link that the search engines will disregard.  DoFollow links are great for ranking in search engines and increasing your page rank, while NoFollow, not so much.  If you are worried about finding DoFollow links, do not worry, there are many lists available on the internet which list DoFollow pages that allow you to submit links.

There is a lot of technical jargon out there involving search engine optimization.  Nofollow links, dofollow links, it can get very confusing.  If you are a beginner and just want to keep it simple, just use the top social bookmarking sites.  Here is a list of them:

• Slashdot
• Digg
• Del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Technorati
• Propeller
• Connotea
• Current
• Mixx
• MyBlogLog
• Mister Wong
• NowPublic
• BlinkList
• Newsvine
• Ma.gnolia
• Backflip
• BibSonomy
• Kirtsy
• Searchles
• coRank
• LinkaGoGo
• Clip Clip
• Associated Content
• Furl
• Yahoo My Web
• Y!buxx
• Spurl
• Rawsugar
• Social Marker
• Kaboodle
• Newsvine
• Twine
• Clipmarks
• DZone
• Faves
• Blanklist
• Diigo
• Simpy
• BlogMarks

If you can find the time to submit your new articles to these social bookmarks daily, your page will be climbing the search engines at a very quick rate.  Also, by using these dofollow social bookmarks, it will help to get your site indexed within a matter of days.

Doing all of these social bookmarks can be a very monotonous job.  You can do all of them within a matter of thirty minutes, once you get all of your accounts created, but this is time that can be better spent of on more important aspects of your business.  I have some advice for you, if you do not feel like social bookmarking every single day.  If you have a teenage child or nephew, outsource the job to them.  Just have them do about 100 social bookmarks a week and give them $10-$20, if you can afford it.  It might not seem like much, but to a kid it is a good amount of money.  It will fund their weekend trip to the movies or gas money to go to the mall.  Plus, it might be their first job.  It can be very beneficial to all parties.  Or if you do not have anyone like that you can outsource to, there are many cheap services online where you can purchase social bookmarking and directory submission packages.  These usually have reasonable rates.  Many of the outsourcing options are from foreign countries where the U.S. Dollar pulls more weight, so this enables you to get a good bit of work done for a small amount of cash.

At this day and age search engines are the ruler of the internet.  Many people are trying to build their websites from scratch, and are finding the task to be quite unbearable.  For a new internet marketer, it can be overwhelming when attempting to build a brand new website.  Even for a more experienced and savvy internetmarketer, building a website from the ground up can be a very difficult and troublesome experience.  There is something called Open Source Content Management Systems or CMS.  These are very user-friendly and reasonably priced website development programs.  When using a CMS, it is very easy for even a beginner, with little or not web design skills, to get a formidable website up and running in a very short amount of time.  These websites that are built are not just generic websites.  There are many add-ons and plug-ins you can use to make your website unique.  For users of these open source content management systems, if there is a question, then there is a large community of people online that all work together to get their questions answered.  Most of these CMS’s have been around for several years.  This means, at this point, they have made their way through all of the bugs and for the most part these programs are pretty bug-free.  Most problems are figured out early on in the development.

Two of the  most common Open Source Content Management Systems are Joomla and Drupal. Both are free and easily installed with almost all hosting plans.  Since both of these are so widely used, there is a great deal of support and information available online regarding them.  There are many pre-made design themes for both of these programs, so finding a unique, personal design for your website is very simple.  If you are looking for a cost-effective, simple way to get yourself a web presence, then an Open Source CMS is a very viable option.

Once you get these programs up and running, they provide very comprehensive statstical tracking of the visitors to your website.  Also, if you want to keep your website in the blog format, they make it very easy to add new posts every single day, with just a few clicks.  Many of their pre-made layouts are very search engine optimized, which makes it much easier to climb the search engine results pages than if you designed your own website from scratch.  With each post you make to your blog, there is a feature that enables you to automatically establish your keywords.  If you use these keywords a few times within your post, you will be a player in the search engines within a matter of days.  If you are looking to make income with Adsense on your website, these programs make it easy for users to place Adsense blocks anywhere on their websites.  Adsense is the small text ads that Google places on your website.  When a visitor to your website clicks on these advertisements, you are paid a commission.  These ads are automatically relevant to the content on your website.

Let’s take a closer look at Drupal.  This system provides a great deal of flexibility to its users.  Contrary to other systems, it is easy to alter templates and navigation bars.  Originally, Drupal was made as a tool for making community sites.  You can use it to build a standard website, but it is more practical for a blog or news site.  Also, Drupal gives you the option to create an RSS feed.  An RSS feed is a feed of data that is sent to all of its subscribers each time your blog is updated.  These are very helpful when it comes to keeping your visitors to your website updated.

Many people feel that Open Source Content Management Systems are not appropriate to use for their online business.  People are fearful that their website will look cheap or generic and not professional.  The fact is, if you are able to become experienced with using the user interfaces provided, then you can make a unique professional looking design for your website.  Also, for many of the layouts, there is a place at the bottom where visitors to the site can leave commments or feedback on the website.  These systems are very helpful for any new business owner with not much web design experience, looking to build a new website.

When you first start your online business, you should have a website.  One of the first important things to add to your web site is an analytics program.  The one I use is Google Analytics.  It is free and easy to install.  An analytics program provides you with all kind of stats and information regarding the traffic to your website.

Also, it is a good idea to do some page optimization.  Page optimization is making sure that your page is very recognizable to the search engines.  Make sure you use your keywords in your page titles.  Put the more important keywords at the beginning.  It is not necessary to put your company name at the top of every page, unless you are really trying to brand yourself.  It is helpful to try to keep your site titles short.  When listing your keywords, sometimes it can be more effective to not put commas between all of them.  This allows your site to pick up on some long-tail keywords and other keyword variations.

Many times when building a new website, people focus entirely on strictly how the page is ranking on the search engine results pages.  While this is very important, there are other important factors to consider, such as traffic.  It does not matter if your website is ranked very highly for certain keywords, if that does not results in traffic to your website.  Also it is important to remember the ultimate goal of the website.  If you are not getting much traffic, but it is getting a lot of sales for your site, then your goals are still being accomplished.

Here are some other good seo tips for your website.  When you are writing, choose your keywords before you write, instead of just picking some keywords that appear frequently in your article.  This way you get the keywords you want in your articles, not just words that happened to appear in your articles frequently.  Also, this enables you to get the right amount of usage of your keywords in the article.  Anything more than 5% will look awkward.  It is also very important that your content is unique.  Make sure to write something that people will actually enjoy reading and find useful.  This way the people that do go to your site will bookmark it and come back for more information.  Adding new content is very important as well.  You are more likely to get return visitors to your site if you provide fresh content daily or at least weekly.  This creates return business as well.  You are not just getting hits to your website, you are also building a relationship with your viewers.  Putting links to relevant web pages also helps.  Do this even if you are linking to your competition.  In turn, ask them if they can include some links to your website.  This will help you get very targeted traffic.  Your navigation bar is a very important part of your website.  If you can get a few of your keywords in the navigation bar without them looking awkward, it can be very beneficial to your website.  Instead of it just saying “about” in the navigation bar, you can change it to “about the wedding planner.”

When you start doing SEO work on your website, set long-term and short-term goals.  Sure you should have goals that include how many unique hits you get to your website per day, but do not limit your goals strictly to unique hits.  Set goals regarding how many sells and conversions you get from your website based on those hits.  Set goals on the conversion rate of your site.  Also, set goals on how many clicks you get on certain outbound links.  If you are able to dictate what your visitors do after they get to your site, you will be able to have a much more profitable online business.  You want unique hits to your website or else you will not get any sales or potential customers to your website, but remember, the unique hits do not make you any money alone.  You have to get the viewers to do what you want in order to get some profit from their visit.

SEO contains some very complex strategies, but when you are just starting out focus on creating good content as described above and start with small, short-term goals.  As your site builds and your content grows, your unique hits will naturally increase, so make sure you pay special attention to what your traffic does after it gets to your site.

There are thousands of Web page directories on the internet. A link directory is a large website with links broken down by specific categories. Most of these directories provide you a link to include your website in the category of your choice for FREE or for a paid placement. Obviously, the FREE sounds better, but sometimes a paid listing can add much more value to your rankings. Here are a list of my 10 favorite (important) Paid directories that you should have your website listed on:

1. http://dir.yahoo.com
2. http://botw.org
3. http://www.business.com
4. http://www.joeant.com
5. http://www.wowdirectory.com
6. http://www.gimpsy.com
7. http://www.site-sift.com
8. http://uncover.com
9. http://sbd.bcentral.com
10. http://www.skaffe.com

The reason I listed Yahoo first is because it is by far the largest and most visited directory on the web. Yahoo offers free submissions for noncommercial categories and an annual subscription of $299 for all other categories. Although inclusion is not always guaranteed even if you pay, most of the time everyday sites are approved with-in 7 days. In order to stay listed, you must continue to pay $299 per year.

The Best of the Web directory was listed second, because it has been around 1994, and was one of the first directories on the Web. They offer free category sponsorship for 60 days and then provide you options to get listed in their directory for a fee. To get your website reviewed and listed on BOTW, you have the choice of paying a onetime fee of $239.95 or a annual rate of $79.95.

The Monster of all Directories is “The Open Directory Project”, also known as DMOZ. Located at www.dmoz.org, DMOZ is one of the most respected directories on the Web. You can submit your site for FREE into any of their categories, however the human editors are extremely selective in who they accept. They look at things like domain age, links, content, theme, keywords, and so many other variables. There have even been rumors that the editors receive hundreds of dollars in bribes daily, just to get a website into their directory. That is how important the DMOZ directory is.

So to summarize, focus on the directories that have been around for at least 5 years, possess a large number of backlinks, and have a high Google PageRank.

Alright, it seems you have decided to build a website to help promote your business. It is the year 2009, and almost all businesses should have a presence on the internet. The first thing you need to do is pick the URL. The URL is the address that people will have to type in to get to your site, you know www.yourwebsite.com. When choosing the name of the website, it is important to make the title relevant to your product or service. If people are going to be searching Google with the word “wedding” to find your site, then it would be a good idea to have wedding in your URL. This gives you a head start on getting your website to the top of the search engines. If you already have an established website without your keyword in it, it is not the end of the world. This is just one of many variables that Google considers while indexing their pages.

Now that you have selected a URL, it is time to figure out how you are going to add content to the site. A good idea would be to use WordPress. There are many tutorials online that show how to get started with WordPress. Most of the time, you can log into your CPanel and there is one click installation. If you have trouble, you can visit www.wordpress.org to have your questions answered. There are forums where you can post questions and get them answered. The WordPress community is very responsive. I talked more about this one of my previous posts: WordPress Blog – Quick and Easy to set-up – More qualified brides to your site.

Once you have WordPress installed, the next thing you need to do is select a layout for your blog. These are also referred to as themes. You can search for them on the WordPress homepage. I recommend, when searching, that you look for themes that are search engine optimized. These themes will automatically make your site more compatible with Google and allow you to rank higher in the search engines than you normally would. Next, you will need to add a few plug-ins to your site. These are also found on the WordPress website. The most important  plug-in is called the All-In-One SEO Pack. This plug-in further optimizes your site for the search engines.

You now have chosen your URL and layout, and have added an important SEO plug-in, so now it is time to begin adding content to your blog. When writing your articles, it is important to keep some things in mind. Remember, we are targeting keywords with our blog that are relevant to the service you are providing. If you have a wedding dj service in Dallas, Texas, then you should target keywords such as “wedding dj service Dallas Texas.” It is good to have your keywords in the title of your article. Also, you need to use them at least 1-2 time within in the article. This helps you get your article listed in the search engines for the keywords you are targeting. You can use as many keywords as you want.

Another good plug-in is the WordPress.com Stats plug-in. It keeps very detailed statistics of where your traffic is coming from. It tells you if your traffic came from search engines. If it did, then it tells you exactly what keywords were searched in order to get to your blog. Additionally, it tells you what page your visitors were on before they got to your site. This is very valuable information that enables you to find out which keywords are working best for you. Although blog stats is good, you would also benefit from having a Google Analytics account as well.

It is a good idea to add fresh content to your blog at least one or two times a week. Google takes notice of this and so do the regular visitors to your site. People are more likely to return to your site if they know there will be fresh information for them to take in during their next visit. Another way to improve your blog is by adding pictures and video. WordPress makes it very easy to add pictures and videos. When making a new post for your blog, the option to add pictures and video is right on the screen, just a click away. Also, the search engines favor websites with pictures and video, opposed to ones with just text. Visitors to your site are more likely to stick around when they see the videos and pictures.

A WordPress blog is a nice, simple way to get started. Do not confuse it for a novice way of going about your business, though. Some of the most famous blogs on the internet use WordPress. It is very simple, but it has the capabilities to make a very attractive, clean blog.  This blog that you are reading is a simple WordPress blog.

SEO stands for search engine optimization.  There are many things you can do to optimize your site for the search engines.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to start a website or blog is by using WordPress.  If you have not used WordPress before, it is a program that you install from the cpanel of your website.  With the rise in popularity of WordPress, many hosting sites now offer one-click installation of WordPress.  If you are not sure what a cpanel is, it is very simple.  You log into your cpanel by going to www.yourwebsitename.com/cpanel.  Once you get in there, there should be an option for installation of WordPress.  Leave the directory field blank.

Once you get WordPress installed, it is one of the easiest formats to use.  In order to log into WordPress, you simply go to:  www.yourwebsitename.com/wp-admin.  You will use your WordPress username and password to log in.  You got this username and password when you installed WordPress.  Once you get logged in, you will see many options.  You can add new pages or posts,  check out your traffic stats, change your themes, and many other things.

First let’s choose you a nice layout.  These are often referred to as themes.  You can go to www.wordpress.org and search all of the themes they have.  You want to get a nice search engine optimized theme.  There are many of these available for free on the internet.  Once you select the one you are looking for, you need to the file and upload it to your “themes” directory.  To do this, you will need an ftp program.  I recommend Filezilla.  There are many tutorials on how to upload files on youtube.  It is a very simple program, and after using it one or two times, you will definitely have the hang of it.  Once you have the theme uploaded, you click on the “themes” link on the left side of the screen.  You will then activate the theme you chose.  All of the information you had on your previous theme will be automatically transferred to your new theme.  This is one of the great features of WordPress.

Making new posts is very simple.  There is a button in the left sidebar that says “new post.”  All you need to do is click on it to begin a new post.  There are spaces for the article title, article body, and tags.  Tags are another word for keywords.  These are the words that search engines will use to find your site.  When choosing the title, make sure you include the words that you will use as tags.  Also, when you are writing the article body, make sure you use the words you plan to use as keywords within the article 2-3 times each.  This is an important step in optimizing your site for the search engines.  After that, you hit publish, and you are finished.  All you need to do is click publish.  Of course, this is not all you can do.  You can add pictures, links, or anything you want.  WordPress uses a very user-friendly interface, so you can add pictures or links with one click.

Once you finish your post, you need to make sure Google and Yahoo are aware that you made a new post to your website.  In order to do this, you need to “ping” your website.  What does it mean to ping your website?  When you ping your website, you are sending out a signal that notifies the search engines and directories that your page has been updated.  The easiest way to do this is by going to http://www.pingler.com.  All you need to do is go to this page, put in the url, blog title, keywords, and a small description and click submit.  After doing, over 50 search engines and directories will be notified that your blog has been updated.

WordPress is very simple to get started with, but there is no limit to what you can do with it.  There are many plug-ins you can integrate into your WordPress blog.  There is one where it automatically sends out a “Tweet” on Twitter, notifying all of your followers that you just updated your blog.  There is another one that allows you to put Adsense on your blog.  Adsense is those little ads you see on many webpages, by Google.  When you set up an Adsense account, you will be paid each time someone clicks on your Adsense.  The most important plug-in is called  “All in One SEO“.  This FREE mod will verify that ALL of your posts are SEO friendly with proper page titles, keywords, and tags.  I highly recommend that instead of writing a unique description, you include a 50 word unique excerpt for every post.  Also NEVER place the same post into multiple categories, this is detrimental and gets looked as duplicate content from Google.  Your best bet is to only have a few categories, and keep all your posts organized within a select few pertaining to your keywords.

When it is time to do search engine optimization for a website, many people do not know where to begin.  Heck, some do not even know what search engine optimization is.  Well, first of all search engine optimization is often shortened to simply SEO.  SEO is described as the steps taken to optimize your site for higher rankings in the search engines.

There are many different opinions as to what are effective tactics as far as search engine optimization.  So we will stick to what has proven to work.  One of the best ways to optimize your site, as well as get some immediate traffic to your site is by submitting articles to the website Ezinearticles.  When you submit your articles, it takes up to a week to get them approved.  Upon approval, your articles will begin drawing immediate traffic to your website.  At the end of your article, you are given a source box which you can put a link to your website in.  This is the reason you write the entire article.  You are leading them directly into the source box, where they will then find your link.  The other reason to submit articles is it provides a quality backlink for your website.  A backlink is a link that will take anyone who clicks on it back to your site.  When your site has many quality backlinks, it helps a great deal in climbing the ranks of the search engines.

Another method to get traffic to your page is by creating a Squidoo or Hubpages account.  Squidoo and Hubpages are sites where you can create your own website absolutely free.  At Squidoo they call the page you create a “lens,” while Hubpages refers to your pages as “hubs.”  At each site you are able to add text, pictures, video, and much more.  The interface is very user-friendly and is designed for someone with no experience in web design.  You are not required to know any kind of code in order to make a lens or hub.  As a matter of fact, a Squidoo Lens was one of the first pages I ever made.  I did so without any outside assistance and had no problem whatsoever.  I prefer Squidoo to Hubpages, because they offer more tutorials and assistance on improving your lens, but it is good to use both.  They both rank very highly in google.  Also, like Ezinearticles, backlinks on these sites will help your main business website a great deal.  Here is a good video tutorial about how to set up your first Squidoo Lens.

Visiting forums can also be a great source of targeted traffic.  If you are in the wedding industry, you can find many forums and online communities that are completely based around Weddings.  It can also be a great source of learning more information about your particular niche.  When you are at these sites, take note of what the members are talking about the most.  Pay special attention to what kind of problems they are having or what type of products they are looking for.  If you can become one of the people at the message board that people go to when they need information or help with something, that will definitely help your business.  Some internet marketers make the majority of their business on forums.  Most message boards allow you to put a link in your signature.  So every time you post, everyone who reads your post will see your links.  Be careful not to get in trouble for “spamming” the message boards with your links.  I usually spend about fifteen minutes a day surfing forums.  I learn stuff from them every day, and also help people with them.  There is also an added bonus to having links in your signature at a message board.  They also count as a backlink and will help your linked websites with search engine optimization.

Do you know what all of these search engine optimization techniques have in common?  They are all entirely free.  Also, each of them takes less than an hour to complete.  So there is no reason why you cannot get started today and put up a hub, lens, an article, and register for a few forums.  Also, each of these methods is very easy to get started with, even for an inexperienced internet marketer.  No excuses, get started today.

When you begin optimizing your site for the search engines, there are many things you need to consider.  One thing you need to do is narrow down the competition that you are fighting with for the same spots on google.  For instance, if you are a wedding DJ, based in Texas, it will be a lot of wasted time and energy to get your website all the way to the top of Google for people that search for the keyword “wedding.”  Sure, you will get tons of traffic, but your DJ business in Texas will not benefit from the majority of this traffic.  Odds are, if someone is searching for a DJ for their wedding based in Texas, they will search for something more along the lines of “wedding dj’s texas” or something along those lines.  These types of keywords are called long-tail keywords.  These keywords do not get as much traffic as keywords such as “wedding” or “dj,” but there are many benefits to being at the top of the search engine ranking pages (serps) in the long-tail keywords.  The greatest benefit is that the traffic you get from the long-tail keywords is obviously very interested in your service.  If you had people going to your website that searched for “wedding” it is very likely that they are looking for a wedding dj 500 miles from you or even more.  They probably aren’t even looking for a DJ.  When someone searches for “wedding dj in Austin, Texas,” this is a very hot lead.  They are looking for the exact service that you offer.  You are much more likely to turn the visitors to your website into actual paying customers when they arrive to your website by searching with long-tail keywords.

Another important thing to remember when trying to rank high in the serps, is that Google loves content.  There are a lot of mysteries regarding what Google actually looks for when doing the search rankings, but two things are for sure:  Google loves good, unique content as well as quality backlinks.

What does it take to make quality content?  When you are writing articles for your webpage, it is good to use the keywords you are trying to rank with, to consist of about 2-3% of your articles.  You do not want to use the keywords too many times, just make sure you use them at least once.  Another great way to boost traffic is by putting videos on your website.  Also, creating your videos and uploading them on youtube can help drive traffic to your website.  When people search youtube and find your video, you can point them to your site.  You can do this by watermarking your video with the URL of your website.  You can also put the URL in the description of the video.

Now I am going to explain what I mean by “quality backlinks.”  A backlinks is any link on the internet that will take someone to your webpage.  There are many ways to get backlinks.  You can post links on message boards, your other webpages, by leaving comments on blogs, and many other methods.  So your next question may be, “How do we know if the link is quality?”  Well, Google ranks all websites.  The way they rank them is by PR or page rank.  They are ranked from PR0-PR9.  The higher the PR, the better.  If you can get links to your website on PR9 sites, it is very helpful in moving your site up the rankings of google.  One of the best ways to get quality backlinks to by creating social bookmarks.  Many of the social bookmarking sites are ranked as high as PR8.

How do you determine the PR of a website?  After all, it is not like when you visit a website, the PR is listed in bold numbers and letters on the front page.  There are add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.  If you have not heard of Mozilla Firefox, it is an alternative web browsing option.  I highly recommend it, as it provides much quicker web browsing, as well as more security measures in protecting your computer.  Back to PR.  Once you active these add-ons they will show the PR of each page you visit.  This will usually displayed in the toolbar of your browser.  If you do not like adding things to your internet browser, there are websites that show you the PR of sites that you list for them.

Search engine optimization is the best free way to provide targeted traffic for your business.  The best paid way to generate traffic is with Google Adwords.  With some work on your website, you can gain all of the benefits that paid traffic gets at no cost.  If you are not familiar with Google Adwords, it is the paid system for traffic offered by Google.  You bid on keywords, then when people search for those keywords, your website is placed on the search engine results page.  The bids range anywhere from a single penny to over ten dollars.  Google also gives your website a quality score which can affect the cost of the bids.  It sounds simple enough, if you have a product or service that converts.  Google Adwords can be a dangerous method of advertising for anyone inexperienced.  Even though you may be spending only ten cents per click, that adds up very quickly.  Remember, Google is the number one site in the world in terms of visitors per day.  Your expenses can add up in a short amount of time, no matter how cheap it is per click.

The other way to get traffic to your site is by search engine optimization.  This kind of traffic is called organic traffic.  When you get your website placed at the top of the Google search engine results pages, there is no cost for that.  You get just as many visitors to your website as you would for the paid traffic, if you optimize for the right keywords.

Selecting the right keywords to optimize for is the most important aspect of this process.  You can get to the top of the search engine results pages, but if no one is searching these keywords you will not see any results for your hard work.  You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help you choose the keywords that you want to optimize your site for.  This is a handy tool that provides a large amount of great information.  It tells you how many times each keyword is searched per month.  It also tells you how much competition there is for the keywords you search for.  Another helpful piece of information it gives you is related keywords.  When you type in a keyword it not only gives you information for that keyword, but it gives you a list of hundreds of related keywords.  For the related keywords it also provides you with information on how many times they are searched and how much competition there is for that particular keyword.  This will help you think of keywords that you may not have thought of.  It will also help you find keywords that are easier to get to the top of the search engine results pages in.

Once you find some high traffic keywords with low competition, it is time to start optimizing your site for these keywords.  When writing articles for your page, it is important to use those keywords in the articles two to three times within the article.  It is also good to have the keywords you are targeting listed in the url for your website.  This alone will give you a head start on everyone else who is targeting the same keywords.

There are other mechanisms you can use to get traffic to your site for free.  You can make free webpages on sites such as Squidoo and HubPages.  These sites have a lot of power in the Google search engine results pages.  Within a day, your site will already be indexed on google.  These pages also allow you to easily list the keywords that you are looking to rank highly in.  A good, search engine optimized page can easily get on the first page of search engine results.  This is very common.  Another benefit of making a Squidoo or HubPage is the strength of the links you put on them.  When you put a link from your Squidoo or HubPage back to your regular webpage, it improves the rankings of your regular webpage in the search engines.  Also, you can directly sell your products or services from the Squidoo or HubPage.  Many free blog providers do not allow you to sell anything on it, but Squidoo and HubPages actually encourage you to sell on their pages.