Search engine optimization has come to mean so many things, but what is worth doing and what isn't? We talk you through the answers to some of these questions.

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About The Author
XO Digital Marketing aims to help main street businesses marketing themselves in the
digital age. Building a local online presence is not impossible & can be more affordable
than traditional marketing. It is far more interactive and allows the people and
personality of your business to shine through.
We provide a full range of marketing solutions to help bridge the technology &
marketing gap for entrepreneurs to focus on their people and products. Need help
attracting new local clients? Need help getting repeat business? We can help on both
fronts.
We hope you find our ebooks helpful in teaching and training you on various aspects of
digital marketing that you can employ today to increase your bottom line. We provide
both baseline and advanced techniques to help no matter what level you are currently
operating at.

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Before we can talk about your websites SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and what
you can do to help get found on Google, we need to understand the basic parts of how
a website is found.
The thing you have to understand is that if you want to play the Google game you have
to be part of a constantly changing machine. The way things worked last week isn't
going to be the same as it is this week.
If we were to break SEO into four parts (for the moment) I would break it into
• Initial on-site SEO
• Continuing SEO,
• Off-site SEO,
• And indirect optimization (Social Media)
On-site optimization.
Initial on-site optimization today is really just a badge to say you know how to properly
construct a website properly. That doesn’t mean everyone has a site build with the best
practices in mind, by this is simply an expectation for all new websites. Your website
may have many pages that should be optimized for content and services that you offer
in your area.
Google has recently made some changes and how they view ranking of a website. The
initial on-site optimization is kind of like bragging about you. It says clearly that I'm an
authority on a particular subject and communicates that I'm really good at what I do.
Back in the early days all you have to do is create a website with a few pages of content
and you were golden. With a bit of SEO work, you had almost as much chance as a
large brand of being found online.
Well this is no longer the case. Google has evolved and what we need to be doing is
evolving as well so that brings the store next point which is..
Continuing On-site SEO
Continuing on site SEO, at one time would've been known as /or is still known as a blog.
However due to its own evolution it is now being called content marketing.
Content marketing is simply taking written text, audio, and/or video and embedding it
onto your website in order to convey a problem, a solution, or a message that you want
to convey to the potential reader that you're trying to attract.

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We could continue to talk about the importance of how and why on-site optimization is
important, however we need to just simply understand that it is important and what we
should do about it.
You need to be unique!
Google rewards original and unique content that helps its
algorithm find a solution to their problems. There are a
number of issues that can come up. When someone
comes to Google to type in a query for lawn care they
could be looking for one of two things. They could be
looking for products related to lawn care or someone to
hire and cut their lawn, two very different issues.
It's important to Google that they provide relevant answers to each unique problem. We
face a current problem with something known as content saturation. What this means is
there is an overabundance of content inside of Google competing for the same problem.
Every industry has people competing for the same thing.
So what do I need to do to be found?
The typical style of writing a blog to be found in Google is to go after homeruns.
Unfortunately as I said before the homeruns are far and few between, what we need to
do is going after base hits. You will need to write consistently and often and work to
target your clients as best you can.
This process can take anywhere from 6 month to a year to be optimized for a number of
keywords your business offers. This will continue to be an ongoing process. There is a
direct correlation with frequency of writing and traffic. So if you can write 5 posts a week
then great, we are going to advise you to create at least 1 a week.
By targeting smaller questions that are being asked inside of Google and having a large
number of them over time will begin to bring you streams of traffic that will eventually
snowball into one big stream. Over time if you target small keywords that generate 50 to
100 visits per month and you have 100 to 150 of those coming in every month that
could represent anywhere from 5000 to 10,000 people coming in per month.
Each article needs to be highly targeted and answer a question that a searcher might be
asking. When writing a blog post or creating a video as a blog, you will want to title it in
such a way that answers the question of the person might be looking for.
For example, a decent way to title a blog post would be
"How much is lawn care service?"

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A better way to title it would be
"How much is lawn care service in San Diego California?"
And the best way might be to title it
"How much is lawn care in California for a standard lot? “
As you can see there are obviously going to be less people asking this question overall,
however it is much easier to target. Do enough of these and you have a huge stream of
targeted traffic.
How do I know what to write?
There are an abundance of tools that you can use, some of them are free and some of
them are paid. I would like to simply start you out by going to Google itself.
Simply go to http://adwords.google.com or http://www.google.com/trends/, login with
your Gmail account if you have one, and enter basic keywords, into the keyword tool.
Google will give you an estimation of traffic and competition. I recommend starting with
a basic phrase, and Google will give you alternative phrases that you can turn into a
question. These tools will allow you to sort out the popularity of a given phrase by low
medium and high traffic.
An alternative to this is to simply write the article based on frequently asked questions
inside of your own office. Chances are if you have questions that are being asked of you
on a daily basis, there are many more people searching for this.
Take a piece of paper or a whiteboard, and write down 50 questions that are frequently
asked to you and your staff. Have your team write them down and use this as a
template for your blog articles.
From this, if you have the time to optimize using a tool like Google Adwords or a paid
one like http://semrush.com then certainly go ahead and do so.
Off-site SEO.
Off-site SEO is the process of going to other high page ranking websites and low page
ranking websites and offering some sort of direct benefit to that website in exchange for
a back link.
What is a backlink?
A backlink is simply a link from another website that points back to yours. There are two
basic different types of back links that you can have.

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1. The first is a direct link that the reader sees and knows is a direct link, it simply
displays your website URL.
2. The second one is called an anchor text link. An anchor text link is a link that
hyperlinks a regular word in the midst of a body of content back to the website. Here is
an example of one created using a popular social bookmark platform called discuss,
notice the words Benefits of SEO, it is a hyper link that goes to our page.
Why do I need backlinks?
Back links are important for a couple of reasons. For one, the link will simply take
readers back to your website so they can find out more about you. Secondly Google
acknowledges this as a form of authority, from another website besides your own. The
more credible a website (in Google's opinion) that the link comes from the better your
website will do in its rankings.
How do I get backlinks?
Generally, and to not make this too complicated simply get back links anywhere you
can, with an eye toward the best quality sources you can. Back links can come from
YouTube, they can come from the directories, and they can come from just about
anywhere. There are different types of back links and there are different qualities of
back links so I want to just focus on one for now.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is simply taking the content that you already have, and reframing it to
be completely different but yet say the same thing, then taking the content and posting it
on another site. There are many sites called web 2.0 sites that you can create articles,
post them and backlink them yourself. This is the most direct and calculated way to get
backlinks.
Here is a list of Web 2.0 sites that you can use, but there are many more.

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http://Squidoo.com
http://hubpages.com
http://ezinearticles.com
http://infobarrel.com
Guest Posting
The second way to get back links, and it's a little more of an art than a calculation, is
called guest posting.
Guest posting is going to another website with a well-established readership, and
writing an article for the author that helps their audience. This is a good place to attract
new readers, display your authority, and get a back link at the same time. I suggest that
if you don't already read a blog or a series of blogs every week, that you pick one or two
and start reading them and start to look around for guest posts that people have done
for the author of that blog.
You must check each blog to see if they accept guest posting and each one of them will
have their own rules. However it is a great and effective tool for getting high quality back
links. Make sure that your article for the guest poster is unique and not used on your
blog already. You should find it fairly easy to recycle some of your content though into a
new guest post, so you don't have to start from scratch. I recommend that you start this
process after you've established your list of 50 and your blog.
Indirect SEO
Indirect SEO is honestly a simple phrase used to capture the whole idea that social
media, and other non blogging platforms are part of Google's algorithm when deciding
who to put ahead of other websites in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) that have
like minded content. Not only could this be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or
literally hundreds of other social media sites, but it could also include directory reviews,
podcasts coming from iTunes, or a self published book on Amazon.
Noone is exactly sure to what extent social media plays in SEO, and it's still a relatively
new part of Google's algorithm. But we do know that it’s influence is growing. Since
there are so many ideas that could be listed here, that I wanted to list just some basic
ideas to help you get started and benefit right away.

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Conclusion
Digital Marketing encompasses many different but related tasks that are necessary to
for success of your business. A great many business owners have not yet taken these
strategies seriously and have not achieved optimal results in there market.
If you are a small business trying to build a brand in today’s world, the time is now to
begin this journey to build your online presence to reach your consumers. Some of
these items in this e-book you may be able to tackle some of these on your own, others
you may want to hire others to do for you.
Visit our website at www.xodigitalmarketing.com to see if there are ways in which we
can help you get started.
 Responsive website design
 Search Engine Optimization
 Social Media Marketing
 Or Digital Marketing Consulting, where we teach you how to market
yourself