This article is the first in a series that discusses the various methods you can use to drive traffic to your website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of optimizing your website so that the search engines rank it high for your target keywords.

With SEO your goal is to have your website appear in the natural or “organic” listings that Google shows on the left. The result: free traffic.

SEO can be divided in two main activities:

1. On-Site Optimization: you need to create your web pages so that they include your main keywords in strategic places, such as the meta title, meta description, h1 tags, and so on. This part is easier and less time-consuming.
2. Off-Site Optimization: Google looks at how many other web sites are linking to you to determine how relevant your website is for a particular keyword. Your goal is to convince as many other websites as possible to link to you: as you can imagine, this is not always easy. And it takes a lot of time to build incoming links.

What are the main advantages and disadvantages of using SEO to generate web site traffic?

Advantages
All the traffic that the natural results bring you is free. You don’t pay for the single click, you just need to invest the time necessary to optimize your website.

Statistics show that the organic listings get many more clicks than the paid listings do. This is because the human eye starts analyzing the page from left to right, and the natural results are the first ones that it encounters.

A top position in the natural results is much harder to replicate than a top placement in Google Adwords. It is easy for a competitor to outbid you in Adwords, it takes much longer for a competitor to replicate your months of hard work in SEO.

Disadvantages
SEO, compared to other forms of traffic, takes longer to show its effects. If you start link building and optimizing your pages today, you will see your results in three to six months, or even longer, depending on how competitive your market is.

Another downside is that the ranking algorithm is updated regularly, so what works today might not work tomorrow, thus you could see your website suddenly fall from first position to fifth position.

You have less control on which pages appear in the natural results, while in pay-per-click or banner advertising you can direct your traffic to the exact page you need to (usually, your “event page”, where the visitor is asked to take action).

Share Your Experience
Have you tried SEO as a method of generating traffic to your website? What were the main difficulties you encountered? Please leave a comment below so we can all grow by learning from each other’s experiences.

About the author: If you are interested in video tutorials and articles that can teach how to increase your web site traffic and build a list of targeted prospects for your business, you are going to like what Vittorio Bosio is saying on his blog: www.TechSavvyMarketer.com.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 5:18 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.