You might receive advice about building web traffic using tricks to get your search rankings up. Perhaps you were offered tools and services to help you tweak the search engine system in your favor. Add this tool, they say or do this to your website now, and lo and behold, you'll shoot to first place, the customers will rush in, and you'll become rich and famous. Sit back and order another dry Martini.

I look at these offers the same way I look at fad diets.
Do you know anyone who lost 60 lbs and kept it off for five years? Keeping in good physical shape requires a commitment to healthy behavior over the long term. It's about your everyday lifestyle, not about a problem you fix and forget.
When you do get in shape, you become more attractive to people you come in contact with, and keeping in shape offers a lot of other benefits too.

A Dating Agency for Small Business

It is the same with search engine optimization; keeping in shape has a lot of benefits, only one of which is sales lead generation. It involves practices that are good for your business anyway. It just so happens, these practices also attract customers, which by the way is the part SiteLeads.net focuses on. We are a "Dating Agency for Small Business". You want customers, and customers want what you have; we help you do the right things on the web to attract customers and keep them happy for the long term. We help you keep in shape.

Diets Don't work. Neither does gaming the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization takes work. That work is manageable when you do a little of it every day. Just like keeping in shape, it's a lifestyle thing. When you tend to it every day, you produce extraordinary results in the long term. It just needs to be tended to every day.

Hiring someone to tend to your yard

gas lawnmower

Some of us like to do our own yard work. At the Scanlan household, we try to do it ourselves. Eventually the neglect overwhelms us (because we're busy raising a family and working) and we have to hire professionals to do a big cleanup job on the yard. In our neighborhood, you can easily tell which families hire someone to come every week to do a bit of maintenance and which ones do it themselves. Those that get a little weekly help are in far better shape.

Search Engine Optimization works like that. Your showing in search engine results will improve if you tend to best practices for the web every single day. What does "best practices for the web" mean? It means two things in particular: (1) adding a significant blog entry to your corporate blog every day and (2) searching for opportunities to spread the word by creating inbound links to your website.

Adding a blog entry every day:

A blog entry must be to the point, succinct, accurate, interesting and valuable. Valuable means of value to the reader.

Creating inbound links:

Regardless of your subject matter, there are forums, bulletin boards and other types of communities focused on subjects ranging from Knitting to Fishing Rods. There are also "generalized" communities like Squidoo.com LinkedIn.com, StartupNation.com and many, many more. Each welcomes your contribution as long as it adds value to their readers. And most if not all are OK with you including a link back to your website as part of your signature in the blog or forum posting you make. The key here is that your posting must give real value to the reader. The payback to you is the link back to your website which both raises your standing in page rankings and perhaps drives bit of traffic through the link itself.

The reality is, while there are optimizations you can apply to your website that will help immediately, the vast bulk of your search engine progress relies on daily commitment to best practices for the web. These activities are good for business, good for customers and they will attract more and more customers the more you pay attention to it. More and more, Google and other search engines engineer their search engines to reward best practices. Search engine optimization companies that focus on gaming the system will go out of business, along with their clients that buy into the notion of the SEO equivalent of diet fads.

Please do add a comment.

Best.

Liam