List Building - Should You Give a Hoot About SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been more prominent since last year when Stomper Net opened its doors. There's no doubt that if you make a page search engine friendly, you're going to get lots of free search engine traffic. But to keep an SEO system working well, you really need specialized knowledge. Does that mean it's not for you? Absolutely not! You can use some simple SEO strategies to get your list building pages seen.

It's incredibly important that you put your opt-in box anywhere you can--the homepage of your website, your blog, your profile at MySpace, and so on. Do that today, if you haven't already. It's that important to list building. You're wasting some prime space there.

To improve your list building efforts, you'll then need to send traffic to those sites. First, find your optimum keywords, specific to your niche. Take a piece of paper and write each one that you can think of down, just anything you think that people might search for.

Let's say you're selling jewelry online. You'll come up with words like pearls, gemstones, diamonds, earrings, rings, and so on. Then, hop over to http://inventory.overture.com and see how many people searched on each term in the previous month. Then, disregard the words with the highest number of searches because it will be too hard to rank in the search engine results for those. They're just uber-competitive. Also disregard any terms with 3,000 searches or less. Nobody's looking for them. They won't help you.

From that list, the word that gets the highest number of searches can be the keyword you're going to try to rank for. The second word will be your second keyword, and so on. Choose no more than five words and use those in every blog post you make, up to a density of 2%. That means, if you have 1,000 words, be sure that 20 of them are your keywords. It's best to choose just one for each post you write. Otherwise, you'll go nuts trying to get a 2% density for three or five. Plus, your writing won't sound right to a readers' ear. It will be obvious that you're trying to get ranking in the search engines, which will see your over-stuff article as nothing more than search engine spam and it will be discounted.

But how does this apply to list building? You'll see. Hang on...

When you've finished your post, and you're sure your keyword density is around that 2% mark, go to your post and make the one of the keywords you used bold or italic. Also link to your website with one of the keywords you used, and make the hyperlink to your list building page. After making several posts in your blog, you should start to see your site rise in the rankings, and you'll be getting more people on your list. Don't expect immediate results because SEO takes a while to kick in. Just keep posting and using your keywords, and you should see some results.

You can do the same thing with your website and your blog at MySpace or wherever you hang out and be improving your list building efforts, too. You don't have to be an SEO genius to use these tricks, and you'll be amazed at the results. So, go sit down and start listing all the keywords you can imagine. Watch them work for you.

Tellman Knudson, Internet Marketing master, is CEO of Overcome Everything, Inc. Get your Free list building CD and a free trial of Tellman's List Building Club when you visit http://listbuildingpower.net