Planning Out Your Basic SEO Strategy With Keyword Research, Content And Links

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most talked about topics online these days. Every webmaster is looking to crack the secret code that will land their website in Google top 10. It seems like there exist many experts who know some kind of secret seo strategy, but does one really exist?

Back in the day it was really simple to rank for competitive keywords when black hat and spam techniques still work like stuffing tags and keywords into web pages and feeding spiders cloaked pages with junk content only to push the real page to the visitor the way you wanted them to see it.

Planning your seo strategy is not as hard as you may think.

It is really not necessary to hire someone to do it for you. Many of these simple techniques can be done in a couple of minutes and will have you getting organic search traffic in a couple of months or even weeks.

Here is a list of some basic things you can do to start optimizing your website or blog for the search engines.

1. Keyword Research

This is where you begin your journey. Every search engine needs to find relevant content on web pages and you will begin by deciding which word is going to be used to base the content of the page around.

It is best to try and target three to four phrase keywords at first. They are easier to rank for and have less competition. They also tend to be people who are looking more to buy and not doing research with a one or two word phrase.

Here is a really cool free keyword research tool that I use daily at SEO Book:

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Play around with it a little bit and see how many times people are searching for something. Find a keyword in your niche that gets a couple of hundred hits a day.

2. Content Building

When you have found the keyword you want to rank for it's now ready to build your web page. Don't worry about having to write a page for every keyword. Just one keyword optimized page can bring in traffic from different variations of the original keyword also.

The only meta tags that you need to worry about in your page is the title, keywords and description tags. I think sometimes that all search engines care about is the title of the page and description since these are what shows up in the results.

Your title should be clever and have a call to action in it. It is important because this is what visitors will see when they search for your keyword. If you just name it a boring keyword it will not get as many click throughs as a call to action headline. The same applies to writing the description. Remember your keyword will show up bold in the result pages, so try to use it more then once for extra attention.

Finish building your web page or blog post now by adding the content and placing your keyword naturally in the body copy, but don't over use it.

3. Link Building

This is the final phase of your basic seo strategy. In this part you just want to build links back to your web page or blog post using the keyword and variations of it in the anchor text.

There are many places where you can get free back links to your page like Digg, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, directories, forums and blogs. Start off by writing an article and blasting it out to a couple of article directories like ezinearticles.com which has a high page rank and will get you indexed quickly.

Content and links bring natural search engine traffic it is that simple. Sometimes you do not even need links and can make a blog post and have it start to rank in a couple of weeks.

Good keyword research combined with content and links is your basic seo strategy that you can start today and get results with.

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