SEO Training Part 1: SEO What’s in it for you?

September 1, 2011 0 Comments

This is the first SEO training blog post to help you, as a small business owner, understand the basics of SEO a little better so that you can either do it yourself, or have the knowledge to find a company to do it for you without getting ripped off.

Before I discuss the ins and outs of search engine optimization, I want to spend time in this first SEO training post talking about why you should concern yourself with SEO and how it can help you to grow your business.

Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is most commonly referred to, is a set of techniques for getting your website found by your potential customers in the search engines, principally Google.

Why would you want to learn about SEO?

SEO can be a very cost effective way of advertising your business by ensuring your business website is #1 on page 1 of the Google search results for those searches conducted on the search engine that are relevant to your business. When you consider that around 43% of searchers click on the #1 organic listing, that can be a potentially large number of people coming to your website, and it costs you nothing other than your time implementing the techniques I will talk about in upcoming posts.

An alternative way of getting visitors to your website is to use pay per click advertising (PPC), where you bid on keywords of your choice and pay everytime someone clicks on your ad. Whilst this can bring visitors to your website quickly, often within a few hours of your ads going live, and is a very effective way of getting leads whilst waiting for your website to hit the #1 spot in Google, it can be expensive to continuously run a PPC campaign unless you have the time to manage it.

Other ways are to pay for banner advertising, which can be expensive and banner response rates can be very low, or using offline advertising in newspapers, magazines or yellow pages. These methods are reducing in effectiveness as more people use the internet to find products and services they want.

So the main benefit to you is that SEO can bring you more visitors, and therefore more clients, for a lot less money than more traditional advertising channels.

My SEO training provides tested SEO approaches

If you follow my SEO training techniques to get your website to the top of the Google search results, you will find that, overtime, your website will stay in the #1 position longer than if you follow some of the so-called “loopholes” people are pushing online. A loophole suggests that certain techniques are trying to trick the search engines into ranking your website. Whilst some of these may work, you will find they are only temporary and you will often see your first page ranking disappear very quickly. In the worst cases some of these techniques can get your website banned altogether.

Don’t be tempted, therefore, to go for the quick fix approaches to search engine optimization, instead learn about and implement the tried and tested approaches that work today, and also longer term too. These are the techniques my blog posts are going to cover.

So now you understand why learning more about SEO can benefit you the next SEO training blog post will explain to you how search engines look at your website and what they do with it after they have visited it.