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Would you try to sell car insurance to people who don't have cars? Or how about selling child safety seats to people who don't have children? How about offering homeowners insurance to people who can't afford to buy a house?
A smart business owner knows that doing any of the above is a waste of time. People who do not own cars do not need car insurance. People who do not have children do not need child safety seats and renters are not shopping for homeowners insurance. Offering these products to them will result in wasted time and no sales.
However, many online business owners are doing exactly that - they are expending their time, money and energy on trying to sell their products and services to people who will definitely not buy them. They do that by marketing to people who are not in their target market. Predictably, they see no results. The same holds true for your business. If you market to people who are not in your target market, you will not get any sales.
Your target market consists of people who need, want and can afford your products and services. If you want to earn money with your products and services, you need to offer them to people who need them, want them and can afford them. It is easy to sell car insurance to people who own cars and are interested in buying car insurance this month. It is easy to sell child safety seats to people who are about to have a child, or need a new safety seat instead of an old one. It's even easier to sell homeowners insurance to people who just bought a house (in fact, their mortgage lender requires this before funds are disbursed).
As you can see, to sell your products and services, you need to get access to people who are looking for them and drive them to your web site. So where can you find people who are looking for your products and want to purchase them immediately? You can find them using the search engines. Over 70% of the people who are looking to buy online, are using search engines for information on products and services they are about to purchase.
In order to get people who are using the search engines to find the products and services you are selling to your web site, you need to use a process called search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Meta-information includes certain HTML tags (title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags), as well as the internal (links between pages on the same site) and external (links between pages on different sites) link structure of a web site.
By using search engine optimization you tell search engines about the material you have on your web site. Once search engines know what material you offer on your web site, they can index it in their database. Once your web site is indexed in the search engine database, it will show in search engine results for keywords that are relevant to the information you have on your web site.
It is very easy to sell your products and services to people who already want them, need them and can afford them. Search engine optimization is the process that you should use to get these people to your web site and have them purchase your products and services.
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