SEO And The Importance Of It To Make Money Online

A lot of people make SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, out to be really complicated and technical when in fact it really isn't, that is, if you want to make use of it properly to make money online. It is an integral and important part of a process that you will have to put effort into consistently and diligently in order to reap any rewards from a home business. While there are certainly a lot of little details that make up the whole spectrum of SEO, there really are only a few things you need to know in order to create an online income, and if you intend to work from home and create a life out of an Internet business, you certainly have to learn and understand the few things that I will be talking about today and in future posts that will help in establishing your online presence which will go a long long way to building your online success.


The first thing you have to get into your head is that if you want to even make consistent online money, you need to, have to, absolutely must, learn SEO. Get the idea that it is too difficult for you to understand out of your head - it really is very simple and straightforward. The only thing about useful SEO is that it can be tedious, and you might not see any results for a long time while working on it, so patience and diligence is something that you will need to nurtue and practise all the time. If you hope to see results fast and do not like to work hard, then the chances of you being in the long run for this are very slim and you will either give up, or you will lean to the dark side, which I will never discuss here as it is not the right way to make money online and certainly not something you should ever want to consider in building a legitimate business, online or offline in the brick and mortar world.


Keyword Focus


Before you build any website in your seach for the online Holy Grail, the first thing you need to do even before buying the domain name is to know what market, and keyword, you are targeting. What is a keyword, you might ask? It is simply the main phrase that you are targeting that describes your main market. For example (and this is a very general example), if you are trying to sell a weight loss program or product via a website, you could be targeting people who are looking for a 'weight loss program'. In this case, your main keyword will be 'weight loss program' and you will then build your domain, website structure and content around the keyword, which is basically what is known as on-page optimization in SEO terms. Later on, when you start working on off-page optimization, you then also build your campaigns around the same keyword, or other long tail keywords which are associated with your main one, such as 'how to lose weight' or 'dieting program'. Work these long tail keywords into your on-page optimization as well, especially the content, and over time and with consistent work, you will have a chance of building a well optimized site that can help you generate consistent online revenue.


Back Links


You can spend a lot of time on on-page optimization but it will never help your money making website to rank well in search engines, which is a key factor in making money online. The most important thing you will need to make your online money making dreams come true, is to rank as high as possible in the search engines for any keyword that you are targeting. Forget everything you might have learnt from the money making scammers that tell you that you need to be a social network master or start spending money on advertising to drive traffic to your site to make money. There are definitely free methods that you can use to get traffic to your site, but the traffic you really need to get to your site in order to make money from it is organic search engine traffic. Period. This traffic are the people who go on to search engines like Google and are looking for something they need. It could be a product or simply information they want, but they have a need and they are likely to do anything they can to get it, including paying for it. Forget about social traffic because such traffic are largely made up of people who are just trying to kill time reading articles online. They will not be clicking your ads or even spending a dime on any product you wish to sell.


So how do you get quality search engine traffic? You need to rank well for your keyword in the search engines. And how do you do that? Simple - put a lot of effort into your off page optimization. And the big part of that is simply to get as many backlinks as possible to your site and its pages. What is a backlink? It is simply a link from another website to yours. Remember, it is not enough to just get backlinks to your main page. Try to spread it around to other pages as well. There are three main types of backlinks you can have, and while one is more useful than the other, they all contribute to your off page optimization, with the first one being the best kind of backlink you can get:


1. A backlink from a site with related content and your keyword as the anchor text.
2. A backlink from a site with unrelated content without your keyword as the anchor text.
3. A backlink from any site, related content or otherwise, without your keyword as the anchor text.


Of course, the gist is that any backlink is a useful backlink, but there are certainly those which are better than others. What is an anchor text? For example, a link might look like this : how to make money online and the anchor text is simply the text that contains the URL that points to the specific website. The more relevant backlinks you get, the better ranked your site will be in the search engines. It might take some time, especially if you are competing within a competitive niche, but eventually, with consistent effort, the results will come and sooner or later, you will start seeing better returns from your online home business and this is what it is all about.


Page Rank


A final factor in your SEO campaign, although not a huge one, is that the more backlinks you can get from sites with high Page Rank, the better the backlinks. While the most important is still to obtain links from relevant sites and anchor text, what makes it even sweeter would be that these links are from sites that have high Page Rank. While nobody knows how Google uses Page Rank in their algorithm to determine which sites should rank higher and which to condemn to the lower indexes, the higher the Page Rank, the more value they place on your content. I will talk about content in a future post but let's make it clear that you do not necessarily need the best content to be considered having something valuable, but if you want to see your site making money in the long run, you certainly need unique content in a way.


So in order to make money online, you definitely need to understand and use SEO in your methods, of which I have gone through some of the basics but which are the most important in anything you do to build your online home business. I have not forgotten that I have to mention some of the other methods and programs you can use to legitimately make some money online but it will have to be in another post. Some of this SEO stuff is also tedious to do and perhaps I will also share with you the tools, free or otherwise, that I use to help me create my online income, and go into a little more detail into how to make the best use of them. In the meantime, I hope you can absorb what I have taught here, and while it might be simplistic in explanation and view, it really is the gist of what SEO is in terms of making money, and nothing else.

Till then, it's

Pete North

How to make money and SEO