Don’t believe it when you hear that search engine optimization is totally free. The truth is that organic results themselves don’t cost much of anything but the effort required to achieve those results are expensive. Whether you are paying someone to optimize your website or build inbound links, achieving top rankings for your website require time and money.

Before starting any search engine optimization effort you need to think about the keywords you will be building your program around. Keyword selection is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization because if you spend you time optimizing for keywords or keyword phrases that no one is searching on, your search engine optimization efforts are wasted. There are plenty of tools available online that can help you find keywords that are relevant to your niche, have adequate volume but at the same time aren’t overly competitive. This is essential if you want to get top rankings for highly search keywords.

Once you have completed the initial keyword research, its time to start investigating your competition for that given keyword. Do a search for the keyword or keyword phrase you’ve chosen and analyze the websites that appear in the first three positions. You’ll want to evaluate on page factors as well as off page factors like the number of inbound links to their website and directory listing. This research gives you a good understanding of your competition.

You can also discover about a topped ranked website by researching it via Alexa.com for additional ranking information. Shoot for keyword phrases that have less than 2 million competing pages, less than PR 6, and less than 500 in-bound links. If the top competing websites are too large, you should pick a different keyword to focus on.

Upon deciding which keyword phrase is ideal for your search engine optimization campaign, the next step is to design your site in a way that is both easy to read and highly accessible by all search engines. Consider breaking up your search engine optimization campaign into on page optimization factors and off page optimization factors. By addressing both, you can quickly influence rankings in a positive way. Consider starting with site design that integrates SEO best practices including meta tags, headers, and typeface. Once complete, turn your attention towards building links to your web site.

I’m often asked for the one magic formula that will raise someones search engine rankings above all others. The answer is quite simple, in bound links. Google evaluates the quality of a website based on a variety of factors but the most important are simply page rank and inbound links. Focus on building inbound links from third party sites that are well established, have a number of sites linking into them, and carry a Google page rank of 3 or more. This will improve your rankings very quickly.

Succeeding with search engine rankings is easy if you take the time to optimize your website and focus on building in bound links. The result is a site more valued by search engines, improving rankings for keywords and keyword phrases. Stay the course and build links over time. This ensures that you outrank your competition over the long term.

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