by Daniel Rusu

Created on: May 29, 2009   Last Updated: May 08, 2010

Students Learn 7 Truths Of SEO The New Requirement To Be A Successful Marketer

With the popularity of the Internet today, marketers are now required to know a new skill to be successful in their field. Gone are the days when a business could stay busy by putting a sign up at your shop window, or throwing up a 30 sec. commercial. Getting on that coveted first page of Google is now one of the main goals of an organization. There are marketers whose jobs deal solely with studying Google Analytics to see how well their web advertising is done and where they can make improvements. 2 students at the University of Washington, in studying SEO, have spent the last month creating 101cheesecakerecipes and applying SEO to the site. Here are 7 truths they have learned about good SEO.

1. Offsite SEO techniques are the key to scoring high in a search engine. While on-site SEO is important, your real results are going to come from offsite SEO.

2. SEO is not something you do for 8 hours one time and then never have to worry about again. It is a continual process, with new content needing to be added to your site everyday, links exchanged, and articles submitted to databases.

3. SEO will not and should not replace offline marketing you are doing. It is important to reach all audiences, those online and offline. You still need to continue using signs and billboard, ect, till you get enough visitors and business through SEO.

4. Consider recommendations from your SEO team - Listen to what your SEO team asks for, trust them. They may suggest content changes, keyword changes, design changes, layout changes, etc. - they are certainly doing good for your business.

5. When choosing the keywords you want to optimize, don't choose the top contenders. Reason being that there is a lot of competition for those keywords. For example, if I'm a shoe company wanting to spread the word about my website that sells shoes, I don't want to target the keyword shoe, or else I'm sure to face competition from the likes of Zappos and http://Nike.com. Instead shoot for the keywords with lower competition and do SEO for those. Often times this means narrowing your keywords to a more specific product you offer. Such as "women's shoes" or "discount shoes."

6. Getting websites that rank high in Google and other search engines to link to you is the most important SEO key to success early on. There is one way of doing this that outweighs another method. Submitting articles to article databases with strong ranking. The key to this is the article cannot be carelessly slapped together. 500 words and good content are required. At the end of the article, include a link to your site with the anchor text you'd like.

7. Many people make the mistake of expecting their site to be on the first page of their chosen search engine within a week. This just won't happen. Expect it to take roughly six months for a site with medium competition for its keywords. Plan your SEO strategy around this, and you're sure to plan for success.

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