WHC Internet Marketing Guide
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is anything that's done for the purpose of moving your website higher up in the search engine results, and maximizing the number of targeted visitors who click through from the search engines to your website.
Many people consider SEO to be dark voodoo that only "black hat" experts can understand. But at it's core, SEO is fairly simple, and anyone can easily learn many effective techniques that integrate naturally into white hat website building and marketing.
The core principle of SEO is that the search engines want to list the webpages that their users would most want to see. By creating the kinds of webpages that deliver value to visitors, you create pages that the search engines will naturally want to link to.
There are a variety of things that make webpages valuable to visitors:
- High-quality content
- Links to high-quality related content (the search engines often reward you for linking to good sites, and may penalize you for linking to bad sites)
- Content that's structured in easy to scan and read ways (for example, inserting large, bold subheads throughout your content to make it easy to see at a glance what each section is about)
- etc.
Link building (getting links from related websites to your content pages) is another critical part of SEO. Without incoming links, no matter how great your content is, the search engines won't know it's great because it'll look to them like nobody else thinks it is. Incoming links show the search engines that people value your content.
Click to download my free special report, Death of the Link Exchange, which covers the core principles of SEO in greater depth and discusses how to build links more effectively and easily.
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