I read an article today that suggested optimizing for longtail keywords was a myth not to be followed.

Perhaps I would believe them if I was not a first hand witness of this process taking my articles to the first page of Google search engines within 24 hours.

I found it amusing that this article did not show on the first page when I searched on the term…

“SEO”

However when I did a search on the long tail combination of…

“organic seo myths”

It was in the #1 position of Google against 2,700 other competitors.

Don’t get me wrong. The article had a lot of interesting points that it brought up. I just happened to disagree with myth #10.

Perhaps the authors point was not to avoid “long tail keyword” marketing but rather optimizing for those exact keywords would not be necessary. In either case I disagree with the final analysis.

Here’s why…

As more people become familiar with the process of targeting long tail keywords I believe it will be more competitive. Therefore, if you only list the keyword once as suggested it will be easy to overtake a given position. Thus, not only would I optimize for each long tail keyword you select but I would also choose 1 or maybe 2 keywords per page as your focus rather than 15 or more like I see some sites doing.

I would include your long tail keyword in both your H1 & H2 tags (which happens to be another point of disagreement I had with the article I read). It doesn’t take long to be working with SEO Elite before the reason to target these tags becomes quite clear.

Also, I would include the exact long tail keyword exactly once at the beginning of your article and once at the end. Not to mention adding it to your keyword & description meta tags as well as the title tag for the page.

Not only does this optimize your page for specific long tail keywords, but it also clearly positions you as a force to be reconed with if and when someone chooses to challenge you for your spot with a given long tail combination you happen to be targeting.

Guy Siverson (AKA SEOGuy) - Are meta tags relevant today? My opinion is @ http://seo-and-beyond.com/A-Art-Dir/Tit1/Search-Engine-Optimization-Basics/Top-Ten-Organic-SEO-Myths-Challenged.htm. - Partner of http://ViralMarketing4U.com

How can I get more traffic to my website?

The more visitors your site gets, the more opportunities you have to make money through sales and advertising.

But as more and more websites pop up everyday, the competition for traffic is getting fierce. Ideally, you should be getting traffic from many different sources. And for the most part, anything that brings you new visitors is good.

But there a few traffic-generating methods that are just not worth the headaches. Let’s talk about two of them now.

The first traffic method you should avoid is paid hits.

Now let’s not confuse this with legitimate advertising programs like Google AdWords. I’m talking about services that advertise:

“10,000 unique visitors for only $9.95!”

Common sense should tell you that something is fishy about these types of services. How can they possibly deliver quality visitors for that price?

They can’t.

They generally work in one of two ways. They either use a script to “hit” your website over and over again or they are part of a “paid to surf” program. This type of program pays people to visit websites, so all that happens is they add your site to their queue and pay people to visit it.

Unfortunately, your visitors will mostly keep your site in the background while they do more important things. Your sire will be visited, but rarely read.

The second traffic method to avoid is called “safe lists”.

A safe list is a list of email addresses of people that have supposedly agreed to receive promotions via email.

A major problem with safe lists is that you have no real way to verify that the owners of the email addresses actually opted in. Their email addresses could have been scraped from any number of blogs, websites, forums, or discussion groups.

Sending emails to a safe list could result in a rash complaints that could get your entire website banned by your ISP.

It’s just not worth the risk.

Use targeted keywords and take them to design your web pages around them using a 6% ratio. Long tail keywords for SEO are the ones that work the best. If possible incorporate them in your Title Page as well.

Your Content

Have good quality content. No fluff! Write articles and post them. Information is what drives the search engine. Always update your website on a weekly basis for maximum SEO. Products and informative articles that are on topic to your niche combined with your keywords equal higher rankings.

Article Marketing

Write articles and submit them to several places such as Ezine Articles, GoArticles, Articles Plus, Hubpages, and Squidoo. In the resource box, where available, add your links along with the description of what you offer .Don’t forget to use the power of social sites as well. Many places allow you to post your articles. Use the power of RSS feeds to add more exposure. Have your articles be informative with current up to date topics. Your word count needs to be at least 300 to 500 words. Check each site for their requirements.

Link Building

Use niche related sites to build backlinks that are related to your specific keywords. Be careful of your anchor text so that you links are clickable.

Google Analytics

Analytics is the measurement of those that visit your website. The reason that I have included this in here is because it is imperative for you to use this to increase your sales, visitors, and SEO. I decided to describe all factors that are of greatest importance here.

What do your customers do when they visit your website? Using this information can increase your sales and SEO rankings.

Where are they coming from? Understanding this will guide you in your niche efforts.

Are they returning? You need to use different technique in this process and if you are not receiving returning visitors, then you need to reexamine you SEO factors.

What actions are the visitors taking? Develop ideas and determine what goals you want to achieve. Follow through with a plan.

Keywords, Again Your Number 1!!! If your keywords are not producing results go back to the beginning and rework the process.

Author: Sandi Baker http://letusgetitdone.info