Multiple Income Newsletter
ISSN 1289-023X

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Greetings!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic on driving traffic to your website, and I'll discuss the ins and outs of SEO.

For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Traffic that comes from search engines seems an overwhelmingly attractive option, as it is free. Well, it's not really "free", as you need to spend considerable amount of your valuable time tweaking your websites to get the results you want. Additionally, you are at the mercy of search engines, and their frequent algorithm change can knock you out of business overnight if you are not careful.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page is a barometer of a site's success in search engine optimization.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

There are a lot of companies working ‘behind the scenes’ to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer someone searching for a specific word or phrase.

Understanding exactly what the search engines want to see when ranking sites requires knowledge of the algorithms. These algorithms change all the time.

Broadly speaking, there are two main areas for SEO:
a) On-page optimization
b) Off-page optimization

On-page Optimization

On-page refers to having your primary keyword (or keyphrase) in the meta tags (title, description), as well as in the content (3-7% keyword density). Don’t try to optimize more than 2 keywords per web page. Stick to one primary keyword per page if you can.

This used to be enough to get a high SEO ranking, but is no longer so. More emphasis is now placed on off-page factors.

There are actually a lot to cover on SEO (on page and off page), and here's a good free book you can read: SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen.

Off-page Optimization

This generally means getting the right kind of incoming links (or backlinks) to your website, with your keyword in the anchor text. It can be acquired through article submission, press releases, reciprocal link exchange etc.

Just remember this:

"You do not need to beat the search engine, you just need to
beat the number-one-ranked website"

As an illustration of how powerful the number of good incoming links can affect your ranking, do a search on Google for the words "click here".

There are currently 6.6 BILLION competing sites, with the download page of Adobe at the NUMBER 1 spot. There are 630,000 backlinks (and some of them are high pagerank authority sites) just to that Adobe page, and there is not a single "click here" words on that page.

You can see that off-page factors carry much more weight these days.

Simply put, you need to "spy" on the competition, find out who's linking to them, and do one step better than them. One powerful software that can do this is SEO Elite, which focuses on improving your off-page factors.

I hope I've put SEO into its perspective, and that you'll be able to harness the power of the search engines.

As usual, if you need any advice or tips on SEO, do drop me an email and I'll be glad to respond.

To your continuing success!
Thomas Choo