An Integrated Approach to SEO Marketing

Most budding or existing webpreneurs have heard the term SEO before. However, I will provide the meaning for the purpose of this article. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the organization of text or keywords, photos or videos on your website so that it gets found by the search engines when people are looking for information on your website’s theme or topic. In order for your website to get discovered online it must show up in the search engine. The statistics show that 60% of a website’s traffic comes from the search engine. Of course, there are other ways to market your website, but why not capitalize on search engine mother load.

The first place to start to optimize your site for the search engine is to do some keyword research. There are many tools out there that can help with this namely, Google Keyword Analyzer and Wordtracker. Basically you want to find out what keywords or phrases people use most when searching for information about your website subject matter, products or services.

Once you establish the keywords that are most likely used to find websites with your theme, you need to use them on your website in some key places. These include:

In the Title of your text
In the First paragraph of your text
In the Alt tags of your webpage (the keywords for photos)
In the body of your text (at least once per 500 words)
In the HTML file name
In the description Meta Tags of the webpage
In the keyword Meta Tags of the webpage

Many experts use variations of the above or more tactics than what is presented above. However, stay away from keyword overuse and take some time when doing your keyword research so you optimize for the right keywords for your website.
The integrated approach to SEO Marketing is to incorporate your keywords into your other marketing efforts so that you get relevant traffic to your website from different avenues. Here I will discuss 4 other marketing avenues to help integrate your SEO Marketing efforts:

1) Article marketing An effective way to market your website. Article directories have strong page rank and credibility with the search engines. So if you write articles and submit to the directories with a link or two back to your website, it helps your website to rank higher in the search engines. Most, if not all article directories have a section during submission where you can add keywords. Use the keyword phrases in this section that are most likely to be used to find your website based on your keyword research.

2) Social Bookmarking Creating a bookmark on social sites such as Delicious, Technorati, Mixx, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit, Jumptags and more. Here you can get a link back to your article or blog entry plus load your keywords. This is called link building. The search engines will rank a site higher in the results if it has many links pointing to it. Link building is also quite effective through link exchanges with other websites in your niche.

3) Video marketing The act of making videos based on niche and circulating it on video websites. This method allows you to have a link pointing back to your website plus load your keywords into each video submission or entry.

4) Press releases An oldie but goodie. Before social media, YouTube, Twitter, the way to market a new website or gain a little promotion for an existing website was through sending press releases. However, it is still a valid form of website promotion and SEO Marketing. When you use a press release service you get a link back to your website and a chance to enter keywords and great exposure if written properly.
There are so many ways to promote your website as you may have noticed. The key is to lay a good foundation with SEO Marketing tactics onsite and offsite from which all your other promotional efforts can flow.