How to Fix 2 Things Natural Search Engine Optimization Won't Do

If you want to succeed online then you need to work around the limitations of SEO, but don’t avoid it!

When you realize what SEO won’t do and modify your strategy to work around those limitations then your business will succeed where others fail.

By the end of this article you will be able to master natural search engine optimization and boost your rankings in the search engines.

2 Things SEO Won't Do

I’ll state right off that you do need to practice search engine optimization in order to succeed online, but it’s not going to do everything for you. It will get you targeted traffic if you set up things correctly but more traffic doesn’t always mean more sales.

SEO won’t replace PPC.

If you’re trying to avoid having a pay per click campaign then you might want to rethink things. Sure, SEO is “free” to some degree, if you do it all yourself, but the small amount you pay for your PPC ads can turn into a lot of profits. If you set up a good PPC ad campaign then your cost per conversion could actually be pretty low, so there’s no need to avoid this type of advertising. In fact, you could miss out on 1/3 of your customer base if you only stick with SEO. And if your PPC campaign isn’t converting then chances are SEO isn’t going to help you convert either. That sort of problem lies in your landing page or product. An ad only serves the purpose of getting someone to come to your page, not make a sale.

SEO won’t make you rich overnight.

I know that most people want an easy way of making money online but you’re not going to wake up the next day after doing some SEO and have an overflowing bank account. Things take a bit of time with SEO because the search engine spiders have to crawl your page, see what’s on your page, see who’s linking to you and so on. Search engines don’t want to rank pages high that just pop onto the scene and then die off quickly. It will take a little bit of time before your site really takes off because of SEO, but that’s no reason to avoid it.

If you want the kind of conversions you would get with PPC by implementing natural search engine optimization then you need to be getting really targeted traffic. Let’s say you have a site about apples and you ship organic apples to customers. How many conversions do you think you’d make if you tried your best to rank high for the keyword “apple”? Probably not that many and here’s why. First, that’s a really generic term and the person searching for it might not be looking to buy apples. They might just be looking for an apple picture or for Apple’s site to pick up an iPod. So here’s what you want to do.

Brainstorm some keyword ideas to really get in the mindset of a buyer. What would you search for if you wanted to have organic apples shipped to you? Maybe you’d search for something like “organic apple prices” or “cheapest organic apples”. Do you see the difference? Those are keyword phrases someone would use if they were looking to buy something. They’re not just researching or looking for an iPod; you know exactly what they want. So take a little time to build up a keyword list that you want to target. You can even use MSN’s Commercial Intention tool to be sure that the keyword you chose is really a “buyer’s keyword”. And you can plug your URL into Google’s keyword tool to get a few more ideas on keywords you can use based on what’s already on your site.

While you’re using Google’s keyword tool, you need to pay attention to what keywords get a lot of searches each month and how much competition you’ll have. Before you decide on your final keyword list you want to find keywords that are buyer keywords that get searched for often but don’t have that much competition. You want people to be using these keywords a lot but you don’t want to target a keyword that everyone else is targeting; otherwise it’d be too hard to rank high. Once you get a list of keywords that meet these terms you’ll want to start using them as anchor text. When you’re linking to your site from other sites you want to be sure that you use at least one of these keyword phrases as the text that you hyperlink.

I know that you want fast results, but you need to avoid those automatic submitters and do a lot of your linking yourself. Auto submit software can throw up red flags and often submit your links incorrectly, so you need to ensure that your linking is done correctly by doing it yourself. So how do you get your site to show up in the search engine results quickly?

First, you’re going to want to implement what some might call “web 2.0” sites. Search engines love sites like Wordpress, Squidoo and yes they absolutely love HubPages! And when I say love, I mean that your posts on these sites will end up in the search engine results very quickly! Honestly, I’ve had pages end up in the first or second page of search engine results in less than a day.

So what you want to do is write a well thought out article that fits right into the field that your website is in. Write a different article for each site. You don’t have to write directly about your site; it’s a lot better if you don’t. But you want to make sure that you pop in two of the keywords you chose to target and link them to your site in the body text of your article. You have people reading about a topic in your field and if they want to learn more then they’ll click your links and end up on your site. But what this really does is help boost your ranking in search engines for the keywords you targeted. So because of these articles you’ll get more traffic from search engines.

But to ensure that these articles quickly show up in the search engine results you need to link to each article from a number of different sites. Some of the best sites that I post to that get me almost instant traffic are StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Facebook, Tumblr and Reddit. When you post your articles to these sites you can quickly get a lot of traffic to your articles which will help them show up in the search engine results quicker and boost your site’s ranking. You might also want to submit your RSS feeds to sites like Feedage and FeedAGG so that every time you post a new article it automatically shows up on these sites. I bet you’re anxious to get started, huh?

These are proven techniques to get your site to quickly rank high for targeted buyer keywords. When you perfect your keyword research and implement web 2.0 sites and social linking then you can easily work around the 2 things that natural search engine optimization won’t do. You can now supercharge your SEO and bring in conversions quicker than ever before.