A Search Engine Optimization Strategy to Bring 20,000 Unique Visitors to Your Site Each Week
by Ryan P. M. Allis

Search engines are the market makers of the Internet. They connect consumers with providers at the very moment of consumer interest and enable all of us to find exactly what we want, when we want it. They bring great efficiency to the Internet and our lives and shall exist as long as the network of servers and computers we call the Web is around.

The first purpose of search engine optimization is to be positioned in the places where your customer is looking. The second purpose is to be positioned better than your competitors in these places. In the world of search engines, better means higher, and higher means a much greater probability that an individual will click on your link. While this figure varies by engine, recent search data has shown that approximately 70% of users, if they click, will click on one the first three listings in a search engine.

There is a lot of misinformation out there about search engine optimization. I have found that most persons believe, for some reason, that they can just optimize the content on their site, submit often to the major engines, and end up at the top. I find it surprising just how many “SEO consulting firms” charge exorbitant rates for rearranging a few words on your site, changing your title and meta tags, and re-submitting to the engines. Such a strategy will have little, if any, noticeable results on your positions in the search engines.

While the title and on-site content is important to obtaining a good ranking, more important is the domain name and the number and quality of incoming links to a web site. Let me repeat this statement for added emphasis. Two of the most important factors in obtaining a top ranking in the search engines are your domain name and the quantity and quality of incoming links to your web site. I have found that the large majority of web site owners have under ten incoming links to their sites. The search engines view incoming links as verification that your site has quality content. The more links your site has from other sites, the higher your ranking in the search engines will be.

Informational Site Strategy

For your SEO strategy, you have two choices. You can either optimize your own site or register a keyword-rich domain name for an informational web site and optimize that. As it is easier to obtain a top ranking on a site that has your targeted keywords in your domain name, I would suggest purchasing a new, keyword-rich domain and optimizing that site. Once you’ve selected the keywords you’d like to optimize for, purchase a domain name with the top two or three keywords separated by hyphens. It is important to have hyphens between each word as search engines can more easily see the words if they are separated. In the remainder of this section, I will be referring to this keyword-rich domain as your “informational site” and discussing how to capture prospect information from this site and convert these prospects to customers on your “product site” from which you will sell your product or service.

While it is often hard for a person to remember the web site address of a URL with hyphens, this is no matter in this case. Your traffic will be coming from persons clicking your listings in the search engines, not persons typing in your URL. I list five examples of actual sites I've built below.

A Quick Case Study: The Results

What are the results of obtaining these top positions? Well, let's take site number one, www.colon-cleanse-constipation.com. Virante started work on this site last September. We designed the site, built content on it, and built 250 incoming links to the site. We finished work in late November on the site. The site was an 'informational site' for the Oxy-Powder colon cleanser product that I had been contracted to market for a client. When I began work with the company, they were doing about $2,000 per month in online sales. By December we had the company up to $5,000 per month. The kicker though comes in January. On January 20 Google updated and the top positions listed above went live. We had a solid number 2 for constipation, a term that gets around 70,000 searches per month across the major search engines, right under the National Institute of Health's site, and #1 for both colon cleansing and colon cleanse. Before January 20, the company was averaging $200 per day in online sales. Between January 20 and the end of January, the company averaged $823 per day. Today, the company is averaging $1,311 per day in online sales and just closed out March with $41,000 in revenue, to realize a 1950% sales increase in six months. To say the least, this method works.

The Strategy

In essence, we build good quality content and articles on these informational sites, execute a reciprocal linking campaign, submit to the search engines, and then wait for them to show up at the top of the rankings. Once we obtain our positioning goal, we begin to receive thousands of unique visitors each week to the informational site. We use an email newsletter sign up form as well as a multiple day autoresponder ecourse and carefully placed on-site recommendations to convert visitors to the informational sites to visitors to the product/company sites and then to lifetime customers.

This SEO strategy is the same one I have used to generate over $3 million dollars in sales for my clients and my own businesses over the past two years. Here is a bit more in depth, step-by-step overview of this entire SEO process.

1. Select your keywords. Use tools such as the Search Term Suggestion Tool from Overture, the DigitalPoint.com Keyword Suggestion Tool, and a free trial of Wordtracker to determine which related keywords or key phrases it would be best to optimize your site for. Once you have a list of potential keywords, go to Google (www.google.com) and type in those keywords. Then see how many incoming links the top few sites have. You can determine this number by typing in “link to: http://www.competitordomain.com.” Take a look at whether the first few sites have the targeted keyword in the domain name, in the title, or often on their page. Use this information to estimate what it would take to get your site above the current sites in the rankings.
2. Register a keyword-rich domain name. Once you have done your keyword research, take a popular key phrase or two or three of the more important key words and register a domain name. Separate each word with a hyphen. This site will be your informational site.
3. Build the design on your informational site. Either create the design for your informational site yourself or hire a firm to do it for you. My company, Virante, Inc. would be happy to provide you with a quote on your web design project.
4. Build good quality content on your informational site. I call this phase the ‘content campaign.’ Either write articles yourself for the site or go through the search engines to find related content. If you find an article on another site you’d like to publish on your informational site, send an email to the author, site owner, and/or publisher to request permission to syndicate their article(s) on your site. Present it as a win/win quid pro quo in which you receive good quality content and the author/publisher receives free exposure and a link to their web site in the byline of the article. I’d suggest having at least twenty-five quality articles on your site before going forward. Optimize your home page for the two or three keywords in your domain name and the most competitive terms. Optimize all your in site pages for the more unique and less competitive terms. You can also outsource the creation of this content to copywriters using a service such as elance.com for about $20 per 400 word article.
5. Build links to your informational site. Without incoming links to your site, it will never have a chance at being at the top of the search engines. Use the research you did earlier on the number of links the sites at the top of the listings have or your targeted keywords to set a goal for how many incoming links you want to build to your own site. To obtain links, go through the search engines and find related web sites, then contact the owners of those sites and offer to exchange links. I’d suggest contacting them first via email and then via phone if necessary. Of course, going through the search engines site by site it will take hundreds of hours to build a significant number of links. There are a number of software programs you can use to greatly automate and speed up this process such as FEE from Lencom Software. In your initial email to site owners, include the URL and description of your site, as well as the location of where there link will be, which site of theirs you are referring to, and the web site address they can visit to find graphics to use in linking to your site. Once you receive a reply with the location of your reciprocal link, add their link to your web site and notify them of its location. I’d suggest creating a resources section of your site and placing your link partners in the appropriate category within. For additional information on building links and software that can greatly speed up the process, you may download a complimentary copy of my 37 page ebook on building links to a web site at http://www.zeromillion.com/building-links.html.
6. Submit your site to the search engines. Once you have built your target number of incoming links, submit your site to the major search engines. Once you’ve done this, just sit back and wait. It will take 8-12 weeks for the search engines to update. Sometime between eight and twelve weeks later, you should be in the top of the engines for your targeted keywords.

While the above steps cover the basics of what you need to know about search engine optimization, there are many more fine details that there is not room to cover in this article. Additional information on search engine optimization and obtaining top rankings can be found in my 55 page ebook, Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines. This ebook is updated monthly and is available at www.search-engines-guide.com. The book includes additional information on keyword research and selection, extensive case studies, details on optimizing your site’s the on-site and off-site attributes, common optimization mistakes, profiles of each major search engine, rank monitoring, and how to properly submit to the search engines. The book costs $37 and comes with a lifetime money back guarantee.

I include the below graphic from Zero to One Million to better illustrate how an informational site campaign can work into your overall web marketing strategy.

If you would like my web marketing consulting firm Virante, Inc. to provide a custom quote on a search engine optimization package, I encourage you to contact us via the request for quote form at www.virante.com. We are one of the few firms that guarantees positions and charges a set price agreed on in advance.

Understanding the International System
by Ryan P. M. Allis

Beginning in the mid-19th century, as world trade was expanding rapidly, a global economic system began to develop. With the advent of the railroad and the opening of the trans-Atlantic telegraph wire in 1866, the first round of globalization had begun. This first round, however, came to a pause in 1914 with World War I, revived slightly in the 1920s, and then came to a halt in 1939 with the start of World War II. As Thomas L. Friedman states in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, “The first era of globalization and global finance capitalism was broken apart by the successive hammer blows of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Great Depression, which combined to fracture the world physically and ideologically.”

After World War II, a new structure was set up that completely changed how the international commerce and political systems operated. This structure was based on the Bretton Woods System, developed in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), established in 1947. The agreement reached at Bretton Woods established two multinational organizations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF would maintain the order of the international monetary system while the World Bank would lend money to the European Nations to help them rebuild and later lend to developing nations. The agreement set forth a fixed exchange rate scheme, in which all nations would set an exchange rate based on the dollar.

The fixed-exchange rate system continued until 1973, when it broke down amid pressure of a U.S. dollar devaluation and increasing inflation in the United States. Replacing the fixed system was the floating exchange rate system that continues to this day. The value of currencies would fluctuate based on the supply and demand in the market and currencies would no longer be convertible to gold. While the floating system offered many advantages, it also created new possibilities for problems that became apparent with the Mexican Peso devaluation of 1994, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and 1998, and the Argentinean Collapse of 2001 and 2002.

The GATT, on the other hand, was an agreement intended to increase trade by reducing tariffs and usage of quotas. If a member country felt that another country had unfair trade barriers in place, it would make a report to the Geneva, Switzerland based GATT administration, which would investigate and act to pressure the offending country into removing the barrier. Data show that the GATT was quite successful. It continued until December, 15, 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed into U.S. law the Uruguay Round of GATT, which created the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is the actions of the WTO that have precipitated the controversy that erupted onto the streets of Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003. Many questions still remain for the organization such as what will be done about agricultural subsidies, currency volatility, worker exploitation, genetically modified food, and political corruption.

Today, liberalized trade, global financial markets, and new technologies have brought us into an era of globalization much different that that of 1850-1914. In one hundred and fifty years we’ve gone from news taking thirty days to taking 1/30th of a second to reach Europe. In seventy-five years we’ve gone from a three-minute call between New York and London costing $300 in 1930 to $.03 with Voice-over IP in 2003. Microchips, satellites, fiber optics, Moore’s Law, and the Internet have made their mark.

Globalization has changed business in many important ways—ways that aspiring entrepreneurs must first understand before they can build a successful business. Today, if your business is to truly succeed, it must be global.

Ryan Allis, is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of permission-based email marketing and list management software IntelliContact Pro and CEO of Virante, Inc. a Chapel Hill, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 19, is on leave for a year from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is an economics major and Blanchard Scholar. Additional information on the author can be found at www.ryanallis.com.

This article may be republished online as long as the byline remains.

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48 Articles - Authorized Excerpts from Zero to One Million
45 Articles - Articles by Ryan Allis, June 2002 - July 2003

This concludes issue eleven of The Entrepreneurs’ Chronicle. We'll see you May 1, 2004. If you are not subscribed and would like to subscribe, please visit http://www.zeromillion.com. If you would like to contribute content, become involved with the zeromillion.com team, make suggestions, or provide feedback please feel free to contact us at info@zeromillion.com.

This newsletter is published by www.zeromillion.com with support from the Entrepreneurs’ Coalition and the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The newsletter is sent using the IntelliContact Pro web-based email marketing and list management software.

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IntelliContact Pro by Broadwick Corporation is web based software that enables you to send out permission-based HTML and text newsletters to your prospects, customers, and subscribers and track campaign metrics such as opens and clickthroughs. Manage and contact all of your prospects, customers, affiliates, employees, and suppliers and benefit from complete bounceback handling and subscription management. With plans starting at $9.95/month and a free fully functional fifteen day trial, IntelliContact Pro is a top choice for list management software. We encourage you to sign up for a free 15 day trial or learn how IntelliContact can benefit your organization. If you have any questions about the software feel free to contact CEO Ryan Allis at allisr@broadwick.com or Vice President of Marketing Josh Carlton at (919) 968-3996.

Virante provides web site design, web marketing consulting, and search engine optimization services. Learn more at www.virante.com.

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