If you're working a home based business and have a website or websites, you need search engine optimization (SEO). The result to this, lies in one word, traffic. Without traffic you virtually don't have an online business. The relationship between traffic and search engine optimization is important and is essential to having a successful online business. A lot of home business owners think that search engine optimization is only for large companies or advanced Internet Marketers. That statement couldn't be additional from the reality of successful home business management. I'm sure that a lot of home based business owners would agree that now a website is mandatory in managing and growing a profitable home business. This uses to just about any type of home based business from multi-level marketing* to Affiliate Marketers. If you were to ask the question of who needs a website and who doesn't ten years ago your answers would be quite different. The primary reason for this is based purely in technology, and specifically, search engine technology. Today's small or home business owner can now tap into the lucrative local market, and have localized search engine activity such as maps, locations and products. Ten years ago this just didn't exist or the technology had not reached the individual user level.
You might say , "I am just an affiliate marketer, and I really don't need localised search." This may not be necessarily true and it really depends on what types of affiliate products you sell Using the example above, about being in the affiliate marketing business, the importance of SEO in the marketing of any product on the Internet is critical. Your costs for marketing, as an affiliate, will drop substantially when SEO is used as the primary traffic driver. Basically you have two main alternatives in getting traffic to your site. The first is SEO whereby you get traffic based on your positioning in the search engines search results pages or SERP as it is called by Internet marketers and SEO professionals.
The 2d traffic generating process is PPC. I'm sure you have seen ads on the Internet for PPC dominance. The fact of the matter is that Google AdWords, for one example is highly effective but can cost you a significant amount of money. Some consultants might say that if your PPC is producing enough traffic and your conversion rate (people that actually buy your products, services or affiliate products) is high enough you will make enough money to pay for your AdWords' advertising and turn a profit. In theory, this is true, but in practice it can be a complete disaster.
There's really a third process for traffic specifically for traffic, it's opt-in email. Opt-in email marketing works probably better than the first two but it requires having a large opt-in mailing list. This is why I didn't include it above. If you have a large opt-in list of customers, you are obviously not in need of any advice here.
Having a prominent listing for a keyword or keyword phrase on Google for example can bring you 1000s of visitors to your site, and the best part is these visitors are free because of your search engine positioning, because they have come via organic listings on the search engine results pages.
What would you rather have: organic free targeted traffic or paid traffic? Don't get me wrong PPC is a highly effective marketing tool but you really need to understand how to use keywords relative to your ad positioning which is another subject entirely. Back to the question at hand, organic or paid website visitors?
Back to the subject of this article, "Why Do I Need To Understand SEO?" it seems fairly clear that if you are running a home business you also don't have a large budget for promotion. If you can effectively drive traffic "organically" for no or little cost, using SEO, it looks to be a no brainer.You may ask what the tradeoff is. It's simply this SEO takes time, it never happens overnight, in fact it may take as long as 6 months to a year. It really depends on a lot of different factors. Patience is the key word.
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