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SEO or search engine optimization strategy now becomes widely popular among online business operators. Nothing strange about it as it allows to substantially increase your gross income, as a result of growing traffic or visitors flow.

That is why one point should be stressed out - your business return on SEO is directly proportional to results your business have now. It means that SEO strategy, unlike marketing optimization, directed to boost quantity, not quality. If your business enjoys 1% response rate for any action you demand, whether it is sale, subscription, feedback or other it keeps on having similar response rate after SEO will be accomplished, although response will grow in absolute numbers as a result of increasing traffic flow.

As you see SEO is not a panacea. The highest and most efficient return on your SEO campaign as well as business investment may be reached upon one condition. Only when your current business model and marketing campaign has already been optimized and reached high level or response rate and efficiency, it is smart to grow your business "in quantity".

The reason for such attitude lies within next speculation as well. Having inefficient business model under conducting web-site SEO will force growing number of visitors to turn your online business down for good. The obvious reason is that too few people actually return to site once they left it for any reason, so having low response rate will substantially decrease your SEO result!

Let's draw an example. With previously mentioned 1% response rate from every 100 visitors you get, would mean that 1 visitor only takes desired action. Suppose SEO campaign increased flow of targeted traffic to 1000. Using children's math we can easily come up with 9 new people, who would start to express their interest in your offer every month.

Now what if your, as some marketers say, "conversion" rate is 10% (10 visitors from every 100) and SEO helped to bring same 1000 targeted traffic. You now have 100 “desired actions” per month! In other words, your net SEO achievement is 90 new people. Compare this to 9 people with 1% conversion rate and it all becomes clear. That is why SEO is mainly about quantity, while response rate is mainly about quality.

I haven't intentionally mentioned about high quality of traffic search engines generate. Many experts would probably be skeptical by now for my evening-out quality of traffic and focusing on quantity only. The explanation is simple - quality of SE traffic is an Individual parameter.

Unlike many marketing and SE experts I cannot tell you how "quality" visitors coming from SE will be for your particular business as I don't know your present promotion methods. That is why quality of traffic SEO campaign brings may be neutral, slightly positive or even negative. Yes, it may be negative.

I anticipate a small shock among online marketers, who were taught for their whole internet business career that search engine traffic is most quality traffic they may have. It is not true under some conditions. If banner or classified ads were only ways of generating traffic for you, then SEO will surely bring a quality improvement to your business response, on other hand, imagine, that your present visitors are interested readers of your books, ebooks, reports, articles and other publications. Do you really think that "response quality" of people coming from "Description tag" of your search engine listing will be higher? Hardly, you can surely expect a slight decrease in response rate of SEO campaign, despite unquestionable quantity growth in accordance with our previous example.

Next vital point is to understand that before anything we, firstly, should have those web-pages, otherwise there would be nothing to optimize. That basic logic will lead to another obvious conclusion. The more theme-based web-pages you have better SEO result you can achieve. If your online business represented by 3 web-pages (main sales letter, about author and contacts), your initial SEO "resources" are too weak to reach any substantial goal. SEs look for information, that is why, content rich web-sites may truly enjoy advantages of SEO.

Secondly, your pages should have already been listed in SEs. If you haven't submitted your web-site to SEs yet, no point to optimize SE listing position you don't have.

An important dilemma every business operator faces is extent s/he allows to reach in desire to get outstanding SEO results. Here is what I mean. As we all know basic rule of successful web-site optimization is focusing on keywords with low or very low competition. In other words, less supply of internet resources for some particular keyword or phrase is, more chances are for your web-page of being "noticed" and ranked high.

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Source code optimization.

{title}...{ itle}

This tag is to be a winner. This is a primary spot to include our keywords for SE spiders, bots or crawlers ("spider" hereafter). {title} tags are best "dainty dish" for SE spiders. They eat them as cakes, so make title tags to be tasty for them, about 65 characters long.

{meta name=description content="..."}

Important Meta tag. Very often description you put will be shown at SE searching results. To my personal opinion they have more important marketing role of attracting visitors than actual optimization. The SEs' trust in "description" tag as well as our next "keywords" tag has been greatly discriminated due to fraud and unfair competition. Make it no more than 250 characters long, including, of course, your targeted keywords as well.

{meta name=keywords content="..."}

Another advisable to use Meta tag should be included with all your targeted and untargeted, but related to topic, key phases separated by commas. Note that highly popular and stand alone keywords like "web-site", "internet", "business" etc. will give you nothing more than increase size of your web-page. I won't be mistaken, if I say that about several millions of web-pages have them. Don't overuse your keywords as well, spiders don't like to be forced to eat what they don't want to.

{meta name=author content="..."}{meta name=copyright content="..."}{meta name=language content="..."} etc.

Subsidiary Meta tags that are used more likely to satisfy webmasters' ego, rather than bring any real help in rankings.

{h1}...{/h1} {h2}...{/h2} {h3}...{/h3}

In contrary to previous tags importance of, let's call them, "body" tags have substantially risen for simple reason, they are readable by visitors and it is hardly to cheat SE with them than Meta description or keywords tags where any webmaster may put anything s/he wants. Given that these tags determine headers of your web-page from SE spiders' viewpoint, try to include your targeted keywords in them.

{img src=: alt="..."}

"Alt" is just a comment for every image you insert into page. Use this knowledge at your advantage. Include your key phrases where possible and safe. By "safe" I mean common sense, don't input comment like "ebook package" into image of button that leads to your partner, say, "Pizza ordering" web-site. On contrary, if your web-site has graphical menu and buttons, it is very wise to include "alt" comments according to directions they lead to, i.e. "Home", "Services", "About Us", "Contacts" etc. If for any reason visitors have their browser with images turned off, they won't see any menu if you haven't inserted "alt" comments.

Content

Your informational coverage should be keyword/phrase rich, same way as headers. In general more relevant key phrases your textual information will contain, better your chances of being "remarked" by SE spider are.

HTML text format tags like bolding {b}, italic type {i} and underlining {u} may also have some weight in SEs placement.

Key word density and frequency are another indexes vastly used by SE to rank web-pages. Don't overuse them though.

Link popularity (page rank)

Another extremely important parameter for your listing position nowadays. In general more links on third party web-sites point to your site better. Although try to avoid "link farms" or other "clubs' only aim of which is to artificially increase your link popularity. These tactics may simply result in penalization or banning of your web-site.