SEO is widely thought of as a total mystery, but if you get these basics right, you will be off to a good start:

Let’s start with a quick review of some basic principles:

People used to think of SEO as a matter of trying to “trick” the search engines.  Certain techniques would be found to work, then the search engines would wise up to that and change their programs, so new tactics would be developed and so on.  The whole thing seemed like a constant battle.  But there’s a different mind-set that is much more productive.  This is to think in terms of what Google is setting out to accomplish and then working in harmony with that.  (I’m mainly focussing on Google for several reasons: firstly that Google is the predominant search engine and looks set to become steadily even more so, secondly because what works there is likely to largely be successful also with the others, and thirdly because the others will increasingly follow google’s strategies).

So what is Google setting out to accomplish? Clearly it’s to provide the best and most relevant content appropriate to the search terms that the surfer typed in.  That’s the strategy that brought the astounding success that it has enjoyed.  So your winning strategy is to have great content on your web pages. Attempts to “game the system” will most likely fail miserably -probably even get your site excluded entirely from the search results.

Let’s look at how Google sets about meeting that objective, so you can create pages that stand the best chance of ranking well.  Nobody outside of Google knows all the details, and in any case the system is constantly evolving - so accurate information today will be outdated in future.  But the broad principles are well understood.  All search engines have software routines that continually explore the web, known as “crawlers”, “bots”, or “spiders”. These gather information about your pages and about the links to them.

The two main areas in which Google assesses your web pages are:

• What the information on your page is about and how good it is, and
• The number of other sites that link to your page, and the quality and relevance of those sites.

Note that Google uses human reviewers to judge page content, to supplement the assessments made automatically by its software.

It is individual pages that are returned in the search listings, not necessarily - or even typically - the home page of your site.  Any given page will usually only rank well for a set of closely-related keywords and phrases.

Your objectives in the light of this is:

• To create good quality content relevant to specific groups of keywords and phrases,
• To make it easy for the spiders to find all your pages and to assess what they are about,
• To encourage incoming links from good quality sites related to your topic (but without doing anything that appears as artificial or contrived).

We’ll now look at some specific measures you can take to
First get clear about what keywords you are targeting - use the Google external keyword tool (free) and/or Wordtracker (expensive and very good, but you can get a 7 day trial for free and get a lot of useful information in that week).

Second break these lists into several groups of related terms. There should be a page on your site that is optimised for each of these groups. These landing pages should link to the pages that contain your calls to action.

Then ask yourself the question ‘Are there already pages on my site that relate to the search terms in those groups?’  Where the answer is “Yes”, apply the following checklist to that page.  Where the answer is “No”, create a new page with a short article (about 400 words) that deals with those topics.

Then apply this checklist to each page (don’t worry if some of these terms don’t mean anything to you - just pass them on to your webmaster or page designer; they will know what I mean)

1. Make sure the text content of your page is clearly readable by the search engine spiders (some “easy site creation” systems don’t manage this).  You can easily check this by viewing your site in your favorite browser - eg Firefox or Internet Explorer - then select “View” on the menu bar at the top of the screen, then “Page Source”.  A new window will open with a lot of geeky-looking text. If you scan through it and can see the actual text content of your page somewhere in between all the scary formatting stuff, you are ok.  If not, you should find another platform for generating your site.
2. I you are creating a new site, choose a name that is a popular keyword phase in your niche.  And in any case, choose file names for all the pages that are keywords related to the content on that page.
3. Don’t have “non-content” material (eg Style sheets or javascript routines) ahead of the material that is actually displayed on the page - either put these at the end, or in a separate file.
4. Make sure you have good quality content that relates to the subject matter, and that includes the search terms that you are targeting, as well as naturally related words and phrases.
5. Set the Title tag for each page - containing the keywords and phrases that you want each individual page to rank for.
6. Include a Meta Keywords tag with a list of the search terms for that specific page. Do NOT put words or phrases in there that do not appear in the text on that particular page - that would do you more harm than good.
7. Include Meta Description tag - Make sure this a sensible summary of the page content that is keyword rich for the words and phrases that you want each that page to rank for.
8. Try to work these keywords into the headings and sub-headings on that page, also the alt tags for any images.
9. Make sure the site is well-linked internally, using text links which contain keywords in the anchor text.
10. Have a page called sitemap.html which contains the links to all the pages on your site.

Then keep making more pages, each one focussed on a small group of keywords, and each with a clear call to action and a link back to the home page and/or other appropriate pages on the site. Make a schedule to do this daily, weekly, or whatever you can manage, and work to it.

Then - it’s a matter of getting links into your site. This is a whole subject in itself, but here are some ideas for a start:

• Ask other site owners to link to you (but Don’t arrange reciprocal links directly back to them - this used to work but now is judged artificial, and will count against you).
• Re-factor each of these “theme” pages on your site (to avoid duplicate-content penalties) and submit them to article directories to be put into ezines, with a resource box that links back to that page.
• Put snippets from the page onto relevant blog, forum and social network conversations, also with a link page to the specific page.
• Use Social networking sites like facebook or Linkedin, or bookmarking sites like Digg
• Make video clips and put them on Youtube with a link back to your site.
• Use services like PRweb to distribute press releases about your site and links to it(only when you can compose a genuinely newsworthy story of course)

Good Luck

If you are interested in getting intensive training and support with this, and all other  aspects of getting an internet-powered business off the ground, take a look at:

The Freedom Course