Many people who are new to marketing a product or service on the internet quickly learn they need something called “SEO”.  Of course, the first question they then ask is “What is SEO”?

“SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization” , and is the process of intentionally increases a website’s search engine rank for specific “keywords” (or “keyphrases”) in various popular search engines by composing “on-site” and “off-site” content containing these keywords and keyphrases.

On-Site SEO vs. Off-Site SEO

In forming a comprehensive SEO strategy for your website, it is important to recognize that there are two fundamentally different types of Search Engine Optimization content: content you place on YOUR website (“on-site SEO”) and content you place on other websites that link back to your website.  In order to successfully optimize your website, you need to address both of these areas.

Generally speaking, On-Site SEO involves creating meaningful content containing your keywords and keyphrases.  On-Site SEO involves going through your site’s headlines, articles, “alt-image” tags, meta data, and link descriptions to load up keywords and keyphrases into the content of your website.  Once this has all be initially setup for your home page and key secondary pages, there is not a lot you can do to further optimize your website’s on-site SEO other than continually add new content to your site.

In contrast, Off-Site SEO involves creating linkbacks from authoritative websites that ideally contain or are surrounded by your most important keywords and keyphrases.  This involves a number of techniques ranging from posting comments on blogs and articles with content related to your keywords to directly contacting website owners who have websites in your market or demographic and requesting such linkbacks to your site.  The fundamental strategy behind growing your pool of linkbacks is to get linkbacks from other highly ranking sites, and to continuously build the number of authoritative links pointed back to your website over time.

Defining your SEO Strategy

Not that you have built your list of keyphrases, and understand the difference between on-site and off-site SEO, you’re ready to implement a strategy for steadily increasing your search engine rankings.  You should recognize two important factors for any SEO campaign to be successful:

1. There are no shortcuts to establishing sustained top search engine rankings. SEO efforts take time to achieve any sort of dramatic results: therefore it is important to set a pace for yourself to steadily improve your rankings over time (you’re not going to get any lasting results in just a week or two of work).  Avoid products or services that promise fast results or guaranteed rankings – these services often employ “Black Hat” techniques (deemed devious by search engines), which may produce an initial flurry of apparent activity at your site, though usually this is either low-quality traffic that does not convert into sales, and could possibly get you banned from search engines altogether.

2. Do not go out an directly compete for short, generic terms such as “auto loans” or “cell phones”.  You should recognize that if you are just starting your SEO campaign now, these highly competitive keyphrases are well beyond your immediate reach.  Instead focus on longer strings of keyphrases such as “auto loans in san francisco” or “cell phone comparison guide” – the point is to find keyword phrases in your research that are being used frequently in search engines, but without as much direct competition from mass markets.  Of course, over time, if you optimize your site for these longer keyphrase strings, you will also be optimizing your site for the smaller phrases contained within your keyphrase sets.

Putting an SEO Campaign into Action

So now we’re ready to put all this into a strategy that will guide you to long-term success.  The key to building both on-site and off-site SEO rankings over time is to develop a Routine that is followed on a daily or weekly basis to ensure that incremental yet steady search engine optimization efforts are maintained over a long period of time.

For On-Site SEO, this means primarily a regiment of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis.  An obvious way to do this is through a blog (as this site does).  Blog postings are rather easy to create, should be written to provide value to your your client base, and can be loaded with keywords and keyphrases.  While it certainly takes time to write each posting, if you were to write just 1 article per week for 1 year, you’d quickly have a substantial base of keyword-rich content on your site that will drive you SEO rankings up with sustainable results.

For Off-Site SEO, this means establishing a regiment of getting linkbacks to your site on authoritative sites.  For example, if you set a target of 10 linkbacks each week, with at least 20% of these linkbacks coming from .org and .edu sites (sites ending with the top level domain extensions “.org” or “.edu”), within a year you’ll have over 500 linkbacks.  You might also consider releasing a regular press-release containing a linkback to your site through sites such as PR.com (cheap) or BusinessWire.com (expensive) to regularly distribute your keyword-rich content to other publications along with the linkback to your site.  You should also send these press releases directly to the editorial desk of any major publications or blogs you feel would be interested in your announcements.

Conclusion

The key benefits to these “organic” SEO approaches is that they are very low-cost, and produce lasting results in terms of your search engine optimization efforts.  Remember, search engines do not WANT to be gamed – they want to provide value to their users who are searching for specific information about specific topics.  Therefore, search engines want to encourage website owners to create valuable and relevant content and are more likely to adjust their algorithms to promote these sites rather than those who try to trick the system.

Ultimately, the web is built around content and if you have valuable and interesting content then both the search engines and other websites on the Internet will want to share this with their viewers.  The larger the network of sites that deem your content to be worth sharing with their visitors, the more easily your site can be found by both search engines and real life web surfers.  While it can be overwhelming to realize that your competition may have hundreds of keyword-rich pages and thousands of linkbacks to their site, start with your research, implement a strategy for on-site and off-site SEO, and be diligent in applying your routine for creating new blog posts on your site and creating linkbacks.

You should notice incremental improvements in your rankings over time, and soon enough, you’ll be the envy of your industry peers – with search engine rankings near the top of all your major keyphrases and perhaps even some single keywords.