What Is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of optimizing your website to get as high a ranking as possible for your key phrases in search engines, thus bringing you hundreds, even thousands, of targeted visitors’ everyday. People are forever arguing about the algorithms search engines use to rank sites, but in my experience, the highest amount of relevant inbound links will rank top. By relevant I mean links with anchor text related to the search. So if a search is made for ‘fishing’ and you have 10 million links to your site, all with the anchor text ‘fishing’, you will rank number 1!

The Key to a Good SEO Campaign The key to being successful is to plan it well. For this I would recommend using quality SEO software. There are lots of different companies offering SEO software so find one with features that appeal to you. The basics features you want are; to be able to search key phrase popularity (helps you determine your niche and the phrases you want to optimize for), check your rankings for your key phrases (this way you can keep an eye on your campaign very easily) and find link partners.

Building Links This is the part that takes the most work. After you have found related keywords in your niche, which don’t have too much competition but a reasonable amount of daily searches, you need to start building links to your website, with your key phrase as your anchor text. To do this you can write articles, comment blogs, find link partners or even join related forums and have a key phrase rich signature pointing at your site. There are hundreds of ways of achieving this, but as of yet, without black hat techniques, there is no real short cuts around this. Sorry.

Keeping It Going Writing one article, commenting one blog, finding one link partner and joining one forum will not get you ranked high. You have to keep at it and be building on it all the time. Your competitors will be. Don’t expect immediate results either, it could take months for a search engine to pick up on a link pointing at your site, but it will happen! Be patient and carry on building links. It will take at least 3 months for any big differences to take place so don’t get disheartened when you don’t become number 1 overnight. SEO is an ongoing campaign and the effort must be put in for good results.