Easy in theory but a lot of work goes into it. Content, keywords, back links. That’s all there is to it. To put it another another way it’s on-page and off-page SEO. Publishing a lot of content has it’s challenges, getting your initial set of keywords via research is time consuming and getting back inks is an ongoing process.

Once you gotten over the initial hurdles look at how the rest just falls into place by leveraging all that work and it’s all free.

On-Page SEO: Content and Keywords

You need to have lots of continent with keywords. By that I mean you primary keywords. Long tail phrases are more organic than planned and rarely do people find the blog/site with an exact match. It is worth it to have a set a long tail key phrases to rank number 1 in on Google. A lot of the time it’s usually a combination of words that are not planned but appear in the article title and body

You need those keywords at the “code” level (Title, Description and Keyword META tags). Using METAs for you SEO is no where near as powerful as it used to be but why publish a page or post and leave them out? They help. I’ve been “found” by a combination of keywords in the title and METAs many times. How do you do that with a blog? Use Wordpress and get this plugin http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Off Page SEO: Getting Backlinks

You need back links to your site/blog off of your keywords. This is a lot easier than you think with Web2.0. First your blog post ought to be written with basic SEO in mind. Lets say you’ve got 50 posts on your blog and your comfortable with 20 being good enough to bookmark. You could probably do more but heck, it’s your NAME you putting out there and you want the stuff to be good. By the way, it’s OK to use a pen name.

• Get someone to do it slowly over time (a couple a week) and you have 20 back links multiplied by the number of major bookmark sites you use.
• Get about 20 back links per post at 2nd tier bookmarking sites by using www.onlywire.com.
• Using Wordpress.com gets you linked via technorati.com when you use categories.
• Comment on blogs in your niche and link to your site off a keyword. Do this a few times a week and it ads up over time.
• Link to a blog post and you’ll get a track-back link on their blog to yours.
• Of those 20 posts, pick the best (5-10) and article market them on 10 directories. Thats 50-100 back links. If someone uses them…more back links.

That ought to get you A couple hundred back links, or more, in less than 6 months putting you on the road to a profitable website depending on how diligent you are.

I’ll stop here but you can see how the “problem” of getting backlinks is ridiculous. Ok, I’ll admit that high page ranked one-way links get you the most bang for you buck–you will need bucks to get them tho’…all these other methods get you backlinks AND traffic for FREE

–Mike

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Install a sitemap on your site. Wordpress has a plugin called GoogleSiteMap. It generates a XML sitemap for Google to crawl. If you have a website, then get a sitemap on there and make sure it’s one that search engines can crawl. A sitemap page is cool for a users but you what you really want to make sure you have something for search engine as well. After your sitemap is there go to Google’s webmaster tools and submit it.

Get verified by Google. The webmaster tools section has specific instructions. You’ll need an account to use the tools so just start one.

I always talk about Google as the search engine to optimize for but there are other search engines in the marketplace. Yahoo and MSN make up the rest of the the search engine marketplace that you should apply to your SEO strategy.

Go to http://www.webmarketingnow.com/ to find out how to optimize for the rest of the search engine market and much more.