Christine Gregory Campos

Intro To SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is how you get your site ranked by search engines like Google and Yahoo in their organic or free results.  The amount of traffic you can get at no cost is determined by just two factors:

  1. How many people are searching for that particular keyword or keyword phrase.
  2. How good your position or rank is with the search engine for that particular keyword or keyword phrase.

There is no lack of tools out there to help you find keywords or phrases with tons of people searching for them.  To start, you are best off using just free tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  It will give you monthly search volume, relative competition, and suggest related keywords and phrases.  You can even input a competitor's website and find out the keywords Google suggests for them. 

Another great place to find keyword ideas is at Alexa.com . This is a site owned by Amazon that is a treasure trove of marketing info.  You should already know which keywords you are getting traffic from by looking at the analytics in your website's backroom.  Now run a search for these terms and check Alexa to find out what keywords they are getting traffic from.  This is a great shortcut to some amazing traffic.

There are a ton of methods for achieving your SEO goals and ranking at the top of the SEs for your keywords, but they can really all be divided into:

  1. Onsite SEO – Essentially this comes down to setting your site's title and meta tags for maximum benefit.
  2. Backlink Building – There are quite a number of methods to build backlinks, but this boils down to posting backlinks on other sites pointing back to your own.

Fortunately, this is all much simpler than it sounds. 

You can simplify your Onsite SEO by simply setting up your site using WordPress.  Whether you are building a blog or a static website, you can do much worse than doing it with WordPress.

A lot of this is done automatically by the default settings WordPress has built into your install.  There is so much more that can be done using free plugins too.  Read more on this in our Onsite SEO posts. 

Backlink building will be an ongoing effort as you seek to rank for an ever growing number of keywords and phrases.  When I started out doing Internet Marketing back in the 90's I did so using Stone Evans Plugin Profit Site.  I was his 69th customer. 

Stone had an amazing one year tutorial teaching his clients the best ways to get targeted traffic to their sites, and how to convert them to sales.  He preached that the number one method to get targeted traffic was through Article Marketing and he was right.  Much has changed since those early days with Stone, but not this. 

Article marketing will get you not just backlinks so that you can rank for your keywords, but people that read these articles will also click through to your website already prepped for the message your site has to offer.  Don't let this overwhelm you, writing articles to promote your site is far easier than you think.

Yes, Social Media is also an important vehicle for posting backlinks but that is usually secondary to how these sites should be used.  Much of what you do with social media for backlinks should be automated as well.  Again, WordPress will take care of most of that for you with plugins.

There are dozens of backlink building methods available to you and we will be giving you access to all of them in our posts here as well:

  • Article Marketing – (at the risk of repeating myself)
  • Forum Signatures
  • Community Website Profiles
  • Blog Commenting
  • Backlink Automation Software
  • Video Marketing
  • Parasite Hosting Pages – (Squidoo, Hubpages, LiveJournal, etc.)
  • And more others than I can even begin to list here…

Keep reading and I promise you will get more SEO tools and resources than you will find in most paid product offers.