You have likely heard time and time again that you must engage in SEO (search engine optimization) if your online business has a chance of being a success. It doesn’t matter what you are offering, the quality of it, or the price. In a nutshell, if consumers don’t know it exists it won’t be possible for them to make a decision about purchasing it. What can be confusing is that there are many different types of SEO practices you can choose from.

You may think that you are doing things wrong and that is understandable. Many online business owners don’t have a firm enough grip on SEO practices to feel confident about their efforts. Therefore when a mistake is made they blame themselves. What is very important to realize is that the trends are going to continually shift. Therefore you must keep on top of them. That way you are always able to deliver what will help you reach your target market.

SEO Practices you want to Use

Here is some great advice about some of the SEO practices that you do want to try. First, ask yourself what is taking place out there online. People are going to social sites to gain access to information. One of the best places that you want to be a part of is Wikipedia. They get hits from millions of people each day on every topic you can imagine. You also want to submit materials to Digg and Propeller. Just about everyone has a MySpace page and views videos on YouTube. Therefore you need to get your information out there with both of these entities.

Links have always been a very successful part of SEO practices. You want to continue your efforts to get them out there. You need to use multi streams too so that no matter which direction your target market is coming in they will run into your information. Such exposure can be the difference between a profitable online business and one that never gets off the ground. You need to have your links with a variety of materials attached to them as well. Don’t use the same copy in all of these directions or it will hinder your efforts.

Ineffective SEO Practices

Likewise, there are several ineffective SEO practices that people still waste their time on. You don’t want to get into a position where you are just laying out keywords thinking that is the best way to get a good ranking. Your materials will be difficult for humans to read when they are directed towards robotic indexing. You also need to realize that each search engine has different criteria and that it is constantly changing.

You are only going to get indexed when you are able to offer something new for the search engines. Your materials may be rejected by directories too if they are too similar to what they have already indexed. You also need to be careful when it comes to how you set up your links. As we discussed you do want them in place but you only want them to be helpful. You can hinder your results if you have too many links on your pages that can take a person to the site of someone else.

It is crazy to spend time and money on SEO efforts though if you aren’t monitoring what you can get in return from them. There are plenty of terrific tools out there that can help you to get the most from your efforts. By having a plan of action you can evaluate where you are, where you are headed, and device a realistic plan to get your there. Here are some areas that will help you to evaluate how well your SEO efforts are going.

Identify the Brand to Non-Brand Ratio

Have you identified your brand to non-brand ratio? If not you need to make it a priority. You may think that as long as you monitor your traffic things are well but there is more to it. You need to be able to identify how much of it is coming from branding within the search engines. If you have a high ration here then do your best to get other methods into action. Once you do so you can significantly increase your traffic relating to non-branding.

Don’t Copy Others

While you can get great ideas from the materials of others out there, don’t copy them. It takes confidence and effort to be original but that is what will allow you to stand out with SEO. The search engines send their bots out all day long looking to index new materials. If what you offer is just to similar to what it has already found then it will skip over it. You want as much of what you offer to be indexed and being the one to go out on the limb with new perspectives and ideas is the way to accomplish it.

What is your Page Yield

What is your current page yield? If you aren’t familiar with that term it refers to your number of pages that are unique enough to get indexed each month. The ratio is determined by dividing that number by the overall number of pages you added. You do want to add plenty of new pages, but your primary focus should be on the quality and not the quantity of them. You need this ratio to be high if your long tail is going to continue growing.

Do you have a Great Keyword Yield?

Do you have a great keyword yield? You want it to be around 2.4 keywords per page. In order to find out where you stand, take the number of keywords you offer with each page. You will want to subtract those that aren’t creating additional traffic. In order for your long tail to work here you have to have a high ratio. If it isn’t where it should be then make it a priority to figure out places to make quality changes.
Are your Keywords getting you Vistors?

Find out if your keywords are getting you visitors or not. You should be able to anticipate 1.9 hits for each keyword on a page. By measuring this you can see the thickness of your long tail. Once again if your ratio is less than it should be then you need to make some positive changes in order for SEO practices to help you the most.

Identifying your Index to Crawl Ratio

By identifying your index to crawl ratio, you can find out how you are stacking up out there with the search engine bots. You want as many of your pages as possible to get indexed. As we talked about, you need to offer high quality and original materials in order for the bots to pick up that material and decide it is worthy of adding to the index. You should be using tools that ensure your materials aren’t too close to what other people are offering.

Don’t Forget about the Engine Yield

Last but not least you don’t want to forget about the engine yield. Your ratios need to be evaluated with the various search engines. If you are only looking at one of them you are failing to get the most from your SEO practices. Since each of the search engines have different criteria for their rankings you need to see if you are doing well overall. You don’t want to form your SEO materials just to get a top ranking with one of them but being terrible with the rest. This just isn’t an effective way to reach your target market.

While it is essential to engage in SEO practices, the focus needs to be on using those that are going to be the most effective. You will realize that there are trends that shift all the time out there with consumers. Therefore you have to be ready to modify your SEO practices in order to be able to stay with them. There is plenty of potential out there for a successful online business if you are doing your best in this area.