Are You Targeted For Failure
By Ron Hollingsworth
Posted Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Have you noticed how some of your competition gets all of the free search engine traffic? Have you wondered why that is?
Getting ranked on the first page for your keywords is vital for online success and it isn’t as difficult to do as you may think. Most people just don’t know how to go about taking back some of that traffic that their competition has secured.
Some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus will tell you that, “It’s difficult to get high rankings in the search engine”, so hire me and I’ll do for _____ . You fill in the dollar amount because I’m sure you’ve heard it all. Of course they are going to tell you that it’s difficult because
* They want your money
* You're willing to pay to get ranked high
* They know you more than likely aren’t as skilled as they are
I’m not saying that SEO companies are vicious and sitting around conjuring up ways to suck your money from your wallet. They are very good at what they do and should be compensated for the great work that they do. I’m saying that it isn’t necessary to hire one before you try it for yourself.
SEO companies spend all day optimizing and marketing websites and have become very effective in getting sites ranked, but I’m hear to tell you that it is very easy to do. You no longer have to pay the hundreds or thousands of dollars you are used to or have heard of.
Some website owners I’ve spoken with think that SEO is a complicated topic and that only SEO professionals can do it well. That’s not true at all. You just have to know what the search engines are looking for.
Would you rather spend a grand on search engine optimization or would you rather spend a grand on other business process and take the time to optimize your website yourself? If you have the right tools and the know-how that is exactly what you can do.
Some website owners may not have the time to spend on optimizing their websites and that’s ok, but if you can find an hour or two a day to work on your optimization efforts you will be surprised what you can do and for free.
I started my first e-commerce website back in 1999 and we hired a SEO company to get us well ranked. That investment paid off as we went on to sell more than $300,000 in product our first year. However, that investment cost me over $9,000.
I thought to myself I just paid nine thousand dollars and they worked on my site for about 5 weeks. So I started to research SEO to see what it was all about.
I was surprised what I learned.
I had researched so much that I could have started my own SEO company. I found out that SEO actually wasn’t all that hard to do. So when I launch my second business I had all of the knowledge to do it myself and I did just that. I essentially saved myself thousands of dollars and my website was pulling in 80,000 unique visitors a month as a result.
This was after only 4 months from launching it.
So how do websites do it? How do they get those top ranking for the most competitive keywords? It’s quite simple actually
I’ll explain.
SEO involves many factors, but the most important factor is anchor text/link text of incoming links. Search engines place heavy emphases on the anchor text/link text of incoming links. Anchor text can be the determining factor in whether or not you place high for your most competitive keywords.
Anchor text in incoming links is so powerful that you may rank well for your most competitive keywords without any other SEO work done period. That’s how important it is.
Link-building should be your top priority in your search engine optimization campaign as it is one of the most influential SEO tactics. Target yourself for success by targeting link building.
About the Author:
Ron Hollingsworth is an Internet Entrepreneur and Internet Marketing professional and has been involved with e-commerce in one way or another for over five year. You can find many reviews of software marketing tools and marketing tips at his website.
