Hi! I’m Joel Orr. I’ve been intrigued by search-engine optimization for years. It seemed obvious: Get traffic from the search engines by ranking for specific keywords. Of course, that traffic then needs to be “converted” into customers–but that’s a separate issue. The first challenge of every would-be Internet marketer is getting traffic.

Of course, there’s a really quick way to get traffic; it’s called “pay-per-click (PPC)advertising.” You open an account with Google or Yahoo or Bing, compose your ads, bid on your keywords, and watch traffic arrive almost instantly. It’s fast, and if you learn to write good ads, it can pay off.

On the other hand, you can also lose money–by getting a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy anything.

Also, as soon as you shut down the ad, the traffic stops.

So while PPC ads may have a role in your Internet marketing strategy, if you want to minimize your risk and expenses, and maximize your long-term traffic results, you need to do SEO–search-engine optimization.

Search engine companies see end users as their customers, and they want to give their customers the very best search results they can. So if a customer types in, “dog houses”–the search engine wants to give the customer the highest-authority sites with the most useful content. (“Highest authority” begs definition, I know; stick with me here.) They DON’T want to present, at the top of the results, the spammiest sites, the ones that are less likely to offer what the searcher is seeking.

SEO, therefore, is about marketing with integrity: Offering the very best content, and excellent products, to the market.

It is also about marketing wisely: You can have the best info and the best stuff, but if you make it hard for people to find, you are hurting your business.

So I decided to study the subject to help my websites get lots of good traffic, people genuinely seeking what I have to offer.

While I’ve done this with dozens of sites, I am currently focused on these:

• JoelOrr.com, for my engineering and architecture friends
• JoelTrainsAuthors.com, for anyone who want to learn to write a book quickly–and build a business around it
• MonetizeU.com, for solo professionals who want to monetize their expertise and make money from what they know
• SEOforWinners.com–this site, which teaches about SEO and offers SEO products and services

JoelOrr.com has a Google Page Rank of 4; JoelTrainsAuthors.com has PR 1. MonetizeU.com and JoelTrainsAuthors.com are in the mid-hundred-thousands in Alexa, and rising rapidly. SEOforWinners.com is brand new; I’m just starting to optimize it. (If you don’t understand any of the jargon, Google it–or hang around here, where it will be explained…:-))

Leading SEO experts agree: There is craft and art to SEO. Everyone in the field understands the craft, and keeps up with the changes induced by the search engine companies. The art varies.

I hope you’ll join me in this adventure!

Warmly,

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