Six Basic Steps of SEO

If you’re just starting out in the world of online marketing it can be daunting at first to learn all about the concepts, much less the technology that comes into play when you are trying to advertise your product, service or hobby. Regardless of what you are selling or promoting though, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all the same. And before you head off down the path, looking for the fountain of information that will get you to the top of page one in Google, take a moment to understand the six basic steps. These six basic steps are the key to making your site rank well in all search engines and they are important to know. Below, I touch on all the fundamentals, but it’s up to you to search out each individually to learn more and master each step.

The first step in SEO is to do your research. I can’t stress how important this step is in succeeding in getting your product and page ranked well in the search engines. Surprisingly, this is a step that is often given short shrift. This is where people cut corners and too quickly move on before gathering all the information. You need to understand though, that if you do not do good research, the rest of your efforts in the next 5 steps will be meaningless and you will work way harder and waste tons of time in the long run.

The basic keys to market research is to find two to three keywords with relevance and a good market value. Make sure these keywords are very focused. If you are selling cherry pies, make sure you try to find keywords that describe the cherry pie, like black cherry pie, or country cherry pie. These are the consumers you want to target, because anyone searching for something that specific already knows what they want. There are tons of software and articles out there to help you do market research and a quick look around on Google and some long term reading will get you a long ways on the topic. I’d like to suggest though that you check out Micro Niche Finder. This is a great piece of software that come with lifetime updates that can really help you out.

This step is obvious, but very important. There are many tools and ways to build a website, but the most important factor is that you are able to use the website. The way you interact with the site needs to be within your skill level so that you have the ability to change things without having to take a class for 4 months. Wordpress is one great way to put up nice looking sites easily. Most Wordpress sites are very versatile and come with a plethora of widgets and compartmentalized programs that are very powerful. Get to know the different types of ways to build sites for the purpose you need them for and then get to work learning how to use them.

You can spend a great deal of time learning about on page optimization, but at the end of the day there are only a few items you truly need to concern yourself with. Make sure you have your keyword in the title, the navigation, the content and the tags. Basically, you want search engines to find your keyword in every aspect of your site. But, you also want it to look natural and not forced. Take the time to fill in a few keywords in these positions and you will be doing well. But, it never hurts to read up more about on page optimization. The more you know, the better you will do in the long run.

Content creation is a fancy way of saying blog posts and articles and any other original piece of media you can put on your site to attract visitors. This topic is so massive and filled with needed information that you really do need to do extra research to find the proper method to do it right. The basic concept is that you want to leverage all your media and waste nothing. That means that if you write an article, you don’t just want to post it on your website once and then head off to write another article. You should take that article and use a program or get another person to spin that article into unique content that you can post on other websites and article directories. You could also read that article out loud and make a video that could be posted on You Tube or other video sharing sites. Get the picture. Leveraging content is the key to getting traffic and making your SEO efforts successful. Learn as much as you can.

The fifth step in SEO is building backlinks. Backlinks are important for two reasons. First, they are ways for people to find an entrance to your article and website from some other place on the web. It makes sense that if you have hundreds or thousands of these out there, then people will have a good chance at finding your page, which is the whole reason we are doing this. Secondly, backlinks help determine your ranking on the pages in Google and other search engines. Search engines figure that if a bunch of sites are linking to your content then the content must be good and therefore should be put to the top of the search list.

The last step in good SEO is to track your results. You have everything in place and now it is time to see how your efforts are working out. You can use Market Samurai and Google Analytics to track the type of traffic that you are getting. By making detailed reports of your traffic you will begin to understand how people are using your page and how you can optimize it to gain new visitors and buyers for your product and service.

I hope this was useful to you in some way. Learning SEO is a huge endeavor, but it can be fun and rewarding if you take the time to do it right. Good luck out there.