An important SEO tip

A lot of people wonder about the merits of buying clicks with Google Adwords compared to getting free visitors with what’s called “search engine optimization” - loading up your web pages with strategic keywords so that you can get ranked in the top ten for Google’s free search.

Of course, at first glance, free is certainly better than paid. However, there’s an important thing to consider first.

You can only optimize a website for about ten different keywords or phrases… not hundreds.

What this means is that you should choose very carefully. You should be choosing the correct keywords and phrases to optimize for.

Here’s the kicker… if you don’t use a pay per click strategy to determine which words and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you will almost always choose the wrong keywords. The words that you initially think you want are almost always different than the ones that actually work.

If you consider the fact that it can take anywhere from 30 days to several months to see results when you’re playing the SEO game, then it becomes apparent that you can’t afford to move forward with an SEO strategy that targets the wrong keywords.

When you do pay-per-click campaigns properly, you’ll see that there are almost always a few really productive words and phrases that only two or three people are bidding on, instead of 10 or 20 (or a hundred!). What that means is that most people are not optimizing their websites for those keywords, either.

The trick you have got to learn is that just like pay-per-click, search engine phrases have varying degrees of competitiveness. If you want a #1 ranking for the phrase “digital camera”, it’s going to be a LOT harder than getting a ranking for “Kodak DX6340″, which is a popular digital camera. And the traffic will be much more targeted, too!

Anytime you work on search engine optimization, it’s important to pick battles that you can win.