SEO Tips from Entrepreneur Magazine

The latest issue of Entrepreneur magazine offers plenty of great advice for starting your own business and promoting its growth, which includes marketing via a website. Amongst the articles is one which provides 5 Ways to Maximize Your SEO for your website (or blog). Below, The Monetizer provides you with each of their SEO tips, with my own commentary added in to each tip.

1) Get a Good Domain - You've heard this advice many times: If you're planning a profitable blog, make sure to purchase a domain early, and make it catchy and easy to remember. Avoid long names and dashes, & make it a dotcom if possible. According to Entrepreneur mag, you should also make sure your domain is built with keywords relative to your product or blog topic, if possible. For example "mypetproducts.com" if you're selling products for pets. Most small business owners know that these days with the economy hurting, using online marketing to create a presence is essential though.

There's open debates over whether your blog needs a domain though. The Monetizer prefers free Blogspot blogs for now, but definitely sees the advantage of having a domain. One thing I would have liked to have created is a forum section for one of my blogs. Having a domain with GoDaddy or HostGator would allow for this. If you are going to get a domain, make sure to purchase it early to allow for domain-aging, which will eventually help SEO.

2) Take Care with Titles - Make sure that each of your website's pages have unique, keyword-appropriate and search-engine friendly titles. According to the article, if you're building a website from scratch with an HTML editor, many times they won't point out you're missing title tags. Blogging platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress have the feature built in, which is why blogs continue to be so popular for SEO and money-making.

3) Use Keywords Wisely - In terms of your webpage or blog content, don't keyword spam them. For example, you've titled an article or site page "Helpful iPhone Apps". Don't continuously spam those keywords in your article or blog post. Instead, use that combination 2-5 times (sparingly) and also use keywords that relate to the ones you want to target.

4) Make Your Contact Info Obvious - This tip relates more to small businesses trying to start up a new venture, but it can relate to the idea of blog branding/networking as well. The article contends that you should hot link your email, even though there are email spammers running amuck. They contend that you want customers and network contacts to be able to find you. This is up to you my friends, and you may notice other bloggers use "myemail[at]hotmail[dot]com" to prevent being spammed. Personal preference here, but make sure you allow readers or site visitors a way to contact you. It could go a long way towards link building, networking and getting your site known by the masses.

5) Link Up - The biggest advice amongst SEO experts and from Entrepreneur mag, may be to get high quality backlinks to your site from similar sites. If you're blogging about travel, seek out blogs in your niche and try to work out friendly link exchanges. The more you get, the higher your PageRank can climb, and the better your search engine results can be! If you're using Entrecard, consider making up a friendly note to send to other bloggers there in your niche. It's an easy way to find a lot of related blogs in one place that you can easily contact and network with!

Keep the 5 above tips in mind when you're updating your blog next time. Recently, The Monetizer has started to work harder to title posts on other blogs I author, to make sure they have a shot at capitalizing off search traffic. When you think up a post, go to one of the SEO Tools like SEO Book or the Google Adwords Suggestion Tool, and type the keywords of your post. See if some other results come up you can work into your title.

You can find the above 5 tips and much more in the December 2008 issue of Entrepreneur magazine.