List Building - Who Cares About SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been more prominent since last year when Stomper Net opened its doors. There's no doubt that if you make a page search engine friendly, you're going to get lots of free search engine traffic. But to keep an SEO system working well, you really need specialized knowledge. Does that mean it's not for you? Absolutely not! You can use some simple SEO strategies to get your list building pages seen.

It's incredibly important that you put your opt-in box anywhere you can--the homepage of your website, your blog, your profile at MySpace, and so on. Do that today, if you haven't already. It's that important to list building. You're wasting some prime space there.

But to increase the list building potential of any site or blog, you'll need to drive traffic to those sites. The first thing you need to figure out is a huge list of keywords that are part of your niche. Write all the words you think of down on a piece of paper.

Let's say you're selling jewelry online. You'll come up with words like pearls, gemstones, diamonds, earrings, rings, and so on. Then, hop over to http://inventory.overture.com and see how many people searched on each term in the previous month. Then, disregard the words with the highest number of searches because it will be too hard to rank in the search engine results for those. They're just uber-competitive. Also disregard any terms with 3,000 searches or less. Nobody's looking for them. They won't help you.

Then, from the words that are remaining, choose three to five and those will be the words you want to rank for. Use them in every blog post you make, but not all at once. Use the first word in a post, then the second, and so on. You'll need to use them at a keyword density of around 2%. That means, if you write 500 words, about 10 of them should be your keyword. It's not that easy, and it's very difficult to get 2% for all of them in one post. It will look and "sound" funny to the reader's ear. Plus, search engine spiders will think you're trying to spam them. Not good.

OK, so we're list building. Right? How does this apply? Hang on, you'll see...

When your post is done and the keyword density for one of your terms is at 2%. Find one of the words you used, let's say it's "bracelets," and make it italic, bold, or underline it---once. Link another "bracelets" to the page on your web site where you sell bracelets, too. That way when search engine spiders read your blog post, they'll see that the word "bracelets" is important in the post and that it links to a page all about bracelets. So, it will realize that your blog post is probably about bracelets, too. Your page will rank somewhere in the results for that term, though it could be on page 50. You won't be surprised when I say that it won't be on the front page at first, but keep using your keywords in your posts, and you'll soon see your site rise on the results pages. When you get into the first three pages, BANG! You've just improved your list building efforts exponentially, and it can happen if you consistently use the keywords or keyword phrases you've chosen.

You can do the same thing with your website and your blog at MySpace or wherever you hang out and be improving your list building efforts, too. You don't have to be an SEO genius to use these tricks, and you'll be amazed at the results. So, go sit down and start listing all the keywords you can imagine. Watch them work for you.

Tellman Knudson, CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc., is a master list builder and well-known for his first project, List Crusade. Tellman teaches you his system for explosive list building at MyFirstList.com.