Sending Traffic To Your List Building Page, Part 5: SEO 1-2-3

This last article in our series is going to briefly touch on a subject that makes most Internet Marketers quake in their boots. Either that, or they just don't give a hoot. Me? I was one of the latter. I didn't really think SEO (search engine optimization) mattered, but over the past several months, we've been working it and let me tell you... it matters. If you want significant targeted web site traffic, then you need to understand these three basic principles, which we'll talk about today.

Once you have these things down, you'll probably see that SEO isn't really that hard. Of course, the SEO masters study this stuff rigorously because things just keep changing. Plus, what they advise us to do is pure guesswork. Only the search engines know exactly what their algorithms are. We just know that their goal is to provide relevant, unique results for every term searched.

So, we do some of the work before the search engine spiders show up. We organize our squeeze page properly and make it easy for spiders to see. We use appropriate keywords, and we never, ever spam. What's that mean? Well, some people put too many keywords into their copy or others may use invisible text that only the spiders can see, but there are many ways to spam and none of the search engines like it. It could get your pages banned from Google, and you definitely don't want that!

We need to discuss the right way to do things.

Your title tag is the most important tag on your page. Nothing else is quite as important, so study it wisely. It's not serving you at all if it reads "Home" or "Index." Go to http://inventory.overture.com/ and do some research on the words you should use.

If you have a store that sells action figures, you might think that "toys" is a good keyword, but when you go to and plug in the word "toys," you find that 69,662 people searched for the word in March 2007. That's a lot of toys! The term is just too competitive. Look for lesser-searched words. "Star War Action Figure" was searched by 1,305 people, while "Wrestling Action Figure" was searched for 2,064 times. Those terms aren't as competitive, but they still get searches. Those are the terms you should use. Right?

Your title tag would look like this: Wrestling Action Figures, Star War Action Figure, The 300 Action Figures The term with the highest number of searches should be first.

The page description is another very important factor when considering SEO. It should use the keywords, just as your title did, but keep your words in title case (only important words are capitalized), like this: "Wresting, Star Wars, and The 300 action figures special report," or whatever you're doing on your list building page. Get your keywords into the description early. The greater their prominence the more weight search engines will give them. Don't go overboard, just give a short descriptive title. Search engine spiders are the only ones who will see it, anyway.

Finally, be aware of your keyword density on the squeeze page. It used to be that a high density of 3% to 7% was what search engines were looking for. So, people went about stuffing their pages with keywords to the puzzlement of their readers. Google figured that out. Now, if you have a density of more than 2%, it won't help you. That's about all you can get into a page without making it hard to read. And it's best to optimize for Google. Then, the other search engines will follow.

You want to get into the first 30 results that comes up for any of your chosen keywords. That's considered to be acceptable. However, the first page is always better, with the top spot on that page being the best! Try changing your pages in these three areas and see if you don't find a difference in your Alexa ranking and your page rank with Google. Then, watch your traffic grow and build over time. Otherwise, you're really missing out on targeted web site traffic for your list building page, opt-ins, and sales! Who wants that?

Tellman Knudson is CEO of http://OvercomeEverything.com. Learn how to drive tons of free traffic to your list building site at http://MyFirstTraffic.com ( http://traffic.overcomeeverything.com/ ).