Generating Traffic for your Home Based Business - SEO (search engine optimization)

By Carl A. Goodnight   

OK.  This is the BIG one.  This is the KEY that opens the door, which may provide golden riches, for you and your family:  MARKETING.   

You’ve finally gotten a website up and running, somehow. If you haven’t reached the website stage yet, you need to find a good software package for beginners and experts alike. Find one that you will not outgrow as you gain more experience.  XsitePro is the software we use.

No website, no online home based business.  

The Internet is changing so fast that you need to be constantly vigilant in trying to keep up.  This means lots of reading and research. 

This article is primarily for those who have a website up and running and are frustrated about what to do next. Even if you don’t have a website but are thinking about it, you should read this article, as it may help you in your quest to build a successful home based business. 

It will focus on SEO – search engine optimization.  SEO is a necessary part of generating traffic on the web but it is only a part.  Some of the promotions that you see, regarding SEO, act like it’s the only thing that will work.  Just buy their program and all will be well.   

Start picking out your yacht and million dollar home.  Not so fast.  Let’s look behind the scenes a little at SEO. 

Keywords are very important to the search engines, in terms of getting a good page ranking.  The higher the ranking, the closer you are to getting your title displayed on the first few pages of the search engine results.   

Most people don’t usually go beyond the first three pages of search engine results, so if your title is on page 1,000, you can pretty much forget about the search engine doing you any good.  No one will even see your title even though the search engine picked it up. 

One keyword that is very popular is:  “home based business”.  With sky-high gas prices, everyone is looking for a home based business, to help supplement their income.  No commute, work at home, set your own hours, make money.  What could be better than that? 

If you go to Google and enter “home based business”, you will get about 107,000,000 search engine results.  That’s right.  I said “million”.  If you enter “work at home”, you will get about 307,000,000 search engine results.  These numbers may be even higher since this article was written. 

There are usually about 10 search engine results per page, so three pages will show you approximately 30 search engine results.  If you haven’t found it by then, most people will go elsewhere.  Maybe you clicked on one of the search engine results and that led to other links not related to the search engine.  So you chase those leads.  You may or may not come back to the search engine results pages. 

If you intend to use “home based business” or “work at home” in your title, you need to come up with a term that is less popular and will not generate so many search engine results. 

I’m not trying to promote anything in this article but we use the term “Carl’s Home Based Business”.  There are only 447,000 search engine results for that title and, somehow, by using various marketing services, we managed to become the fourth listing on the first page, as of this writing. 

Maybe we have a chance with the search engines if our title becomes popular.  As of this writing, our title popularity, and the resulting hits to our website, remain to be seen.  Everyone says to be patient (you will need a LOT of that), so we’ll see. 

Google is always refining their search results rules, so as to make a visitor’s search more relevant.  Tomorrow, we may be on page 1,000, but you have to keep trying to make the content of your web pages relevant for your visitors.   

If you’re going to build a home based business on the Internet, you need to educate yourself about the inner workings of the Internet.  It’s fascinating how it all works and you will discover many things that you won’t read about in books but you must put forth the effort if you want to be successful. 

Check out the SEO packages that you come across and put a toe in the water.  Pick one that suits you and try it on for size but don’t expect results overnight, in spite of what the ads say. 

There are many topics for future articles, such as: 

1.   Promotions touting how much money people can make in a week or a month. 

2.   Building a small and profitable home based business instead of trying to build an empire and failing. 

3.   Deep Linking – getting visitors to go beyond the home page on your website. 

4.   Building mailing lists. 

5.   Using analytics programs to measure where traffic is coming from and where it goes on your website. 

6.   Some thoughts about Google AdSense.  My personal experiences but there are good books on the subject. 

7.   Using links, not deep links, to generate traffic.  There are reciprocal links and one way links. 

8.   Writing articles or having them written for you (ghost-writers). 

9.   People not answering e-mails.  Get used to this as it happens all the time. 

10. Subscribing to website marketing services. 

11. Paying for ads.  

Carl A. Goodnight, Author          e-mail: goodcarl@carlswebsitetemplates.com.

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