Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to success in your home internet marketing business.  

You are maybe like me.  When I started in internet marketing, I didn’t know anything about Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  When I first heard the term, I completely ignored it.  It sounded like something for advanced internet marketers only.  I didn’t think it pertained to me.

I received some great training on writing articles and providing good content to the reader.  I felt that my internet marketing career was ready to blast off.  

I started posting a lot of articles to websites such as Hubpages, Squidoo, and Ezine Articles.  I was surprised to see that none of my articles were listed on the first two pages of Google and Yahoo.  Where were they?  I kept looking on page after page but they were nowhere to be found.
 
I soon realized that search engine optimization (SEO) was not just for the advanced internet marketer.  It was just as important for the beginner and intermediate marketer.  I discovered that using SEO was critical to getting a high rank on the search engines.  

It’s not enough to put great content on the web in the form of an article or video. You must find a way to get people to look at your content.

I went back to my internet marketing training and spent much more time watching the training tutorials on search engine optimization. I began applying what I learned. The views of my articles began to increase.

Here are some important things to consider as you start applying search engine optimization or SEO.

1. Make a target market selection. You need to know what group of people you are addressing. Your marketing campaign should be designed to attract people from your specific target market.

2. Write down 3-5 good keywords that relate to your target market – keywords your market will be searching for. If the keywords you select are too generic, you will be trying to attract people from a market that is too competitive. Instead, use long-tail keywords. This will greatly reduce the number of competitors you face. See #4 for more detailed information.

3. Find a good keyword search tool. I like to use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It’s free and gives you an idea of the popularity of various keywords.

4. Go to Google and do a live search for the keywords you have selected. You may find that the keywords you have chosen are too competitive.

For example, let’s say you market a line of organic vegetable gardening products. If you search for the keyword “gardening” on Google, that word (with quotation marks) has 51,200,000 competitors. You don’t have a very good chance of being noticed when you use that keyword.

Use “vegetable gardening” and you are competing against 957,000 others – still too many.

But then use a long-tail keyword such as “organic vegetable gardening tips” and the number of competitors is reduced to 169,000. Or use “organic vegetable gardening for beginners” and the number of competitors goes down to 15,500.

If you are knowledgeable in search engine optimization (SEO), you can get a lot of traffic to your article, video, website, or blog by using one of the last two keyword phrases.

5. Develop your marketing strategy in a way that you have incoming links. Bookmark your articles and videos.

Here is the important thing. Get the very best search engine optimization (SEO) training. It’s critical to your success.

Scott Hubbard has been able to retire from his Chief Financial Officer position of 25 years in corporate America. He now assists corporate professionals and serious internet marketers in developing their own "guide to retirement" plan.

After making the proper target market selection, an entrepreneur's next step is to attract leads. Scott offers a free report on how to generate free, qualified leads online.