Search Engine Optimization for Internet Marketing

Important tips for success

One of the most talked about and written about topics in internet commerce is search engine optimization for internet marketing.  Many companies want to sell you their services to get your website ranked highly by the leading search engines, primarily Google, Yahoo and MSN.  The question you may be asking is “What is search engine optimization for internet marketing, and how can I use it to help my e-business?"

Search engine optimization for internet marketing is the strategy of getting your website listed at the top of page 1 when a web surfer puts certain search terms into a search engine.  Achieving this has a lot to do with keywords in the body, titles, and meta tags of your web pages.  Here's a description of each of these items and how you can use them to achieve better results in the search engines.

Keywords are words or phrases that you want to be associated with your website.  For example, you may want your business to be close to the top in a search for stained glass windows. Your keywords would be what you think people searching for your product will type into a search window.  It may be reasonable to think that a person would type in  “stained glass window” or “picture window”.  But you may even want to consider “stain glass window” because there is a fairly reasonable chance that searchers will type in these search words.  In search engine optimization internet marketing it’s not about what keywords a person should use to do their search, but more importantly what they will use.   You should account for a variety of possibilities.

The body of your website is the actual content that the viewer sees.  This ranges from descriptions to articles to labels and everything in between.  It’s important that you include your keywords in the body of your web page to help with search engine optimization internet marketing.  If you aren’t comfortable writing your own content, have someone write it for you.  This can be a person you know who has good writing skills, or a freelancer you hire who is skilled in writing with keywords.  Either way, it’s important to have solid, keyword rich content that also provides the viewer with the information they are looking for.

Titles are just what they sound like – the title of your web page.  This title is physically the first line of your page as seen by the viewer.  Search engines look at this as well, and this is important to keep in mind when coming up with what keywords you will put in your title.  The title tag for your website on stained glass windows could be:

<title>Andrea’s Stained Glass Windows</title>

Meta tags are also located in the html code, and they were originally used mostly to redirect websites.  These tags are seen by the browser and by the search engines, but not by the person viewing the web page.  Because of this, people now use meta tags to include keywords they want the search engines to see but don’t necessarily want to put (or put over and over) in a web page’s viewed content.  The meta tag code for your website on stained glass windows could read:

<meta name="keywords" content="stained glass window, picture window, stain glass window">

It should be noted that the keyword meta tag is pretty much ignored by the search engines today because there was so much keyword "stuffing" or "spamming" that the tag became useless for the search engines. When I refer to "stuffing" or "spamming" I mean that webmasters would put as many combinations and permutations of keywords that they could dream up even if they had no relationship to the current page.

Another meta tag is the description tag. This is a short description of what the page is about. It is sometimes displayed in the search engine results. The description tag for this site might be something like:

<meta name="description" content="Stained glass windows add a touch of class anywhere they are used. You'll learn more about beautiful stained glass windows here">

These are just a few tips on how search engine optimization internet marketing works to make your website more effective in the e-commerce world.  Remember that it’s not just about having a great website, but also about how to get people to your great website.