Therefore, stay away from SEO services that will "get you ranked with 12,000 search engines for $9.95." Those services will usually get your Yoga website "blacklisted," if they continuously submit every month. The search engines just ignore your continuous submissions as SPAM. If you want to save significant money, and do some of it yourself, buy the book, "Search Engine Optimization for Dummies."



One last point to bring up about SEO: There are only a few search engines that you really need to submit to. Start with these: Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Ask, Netscape, Dog Pile, and Alta Vista.

The above-mentioned eight search engines receive over 90% of all the traffic on the internet. Currently, Google easily gets more than half of all the Internet traffic. Some statistics claim that Google gets over 75% of all the web traffic.

Yes, there are thousands of other search engines, but what is their geographic reach? Many of them are specialized search engines that are made for a particular country or language. If you have a local Yoga studio, do you have to be listed in a search engine on the other side of the planet? For example: Let's say you teach Yoga in a suburb of Denver, Colorado and are listed in a Korean search engine. That's nice, but I doubt that you will get any walk-ins, from that listing, in your next Yoga class.

Pay-per-click campaigns can get your Yoga business a space on the front page of most search engines. Google has more than half of all the internet traffic, so their Adwords program, alone, is worth looking into for a start.

Here's an idea: Start your Yoga web site, or Blog, ASAP (as soon as possible!), keep it running, and expand when you grow. Do not get hung up on perfection; that's what causes procrastination. If we did that in Yoga, none of us would become Yoga teachers.

I don't care if you're teaching Yoga in a cellar, barn, loft, garage, in the woods, at the beach, or just thinking about it. People won't know you are a Yoga teacher, if you don't announce it.

© Copyright 2006 - Paul Jerard / Aura Publications