SEO Tutorial Part 1 - The Holy Grail Of SEO

You've finished your web design, uploaded your files, and set up your blog, but you're still not getting as many visitors as you hoped for. What gives? Chances are you haven't started working on one of the most important ways to market your site, Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization refers to the collection of techniques and practices that allow a site to get more traffic from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). SEO can be divided into two main areas: off-page SEO (work that takes place separate from the website) and on-page SEO (website changes to make your website rank better). This tutorial will cover both areas in detail! Remember, a website is not fully optimized for search engines unless it employs both on and off-page SEO.

I hope I've managed to get your attention. If you follow this guide closely, you will see result! Let's start with the basics, I know - boring - but necessary.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Practicing SEO means getting your website to end up on Page #1 in the organic search result for a particular keyword phrase...

The main idea of course, is to get an endless flow of free traffic to your website :)

Imagine if you sell flowers, and you rank #1 in Google's search result for "buy flowers online". Imagine what that can do to your business?

Successful SEO => free traffic => cash in your pocket!!

The problem is: how to get a website to rank #1 in Google?.

If you read any SEO book, I bet you will get a standardanswer that says SEO is made up of two components: On-page optimization and Off-page optimization.

We will talk about on-page optimization in another tutorial.In this tutorial, our focus is on Off-page optimization.Why? Because it's the most important of the two. I'll show this as well to you later on.

What is Off-page optimization? Well, off-page optimization is basically all about link building.Technically, you can get any web page (not just website) into the first page of Google for a particular search term simply by building lots of different backlinks to that webpage using that search term as the hyperlinked text (a.k.a. anchor text).

For example, if you want to rank #1 for the search term "buy flowers online", you'll need to have lots of different backlinks to your web page using "buy flowers online" as the anchor text.(But there's a catch! I'll explain it in Part 4 of this tutorial...)

In case you haven't got the idea, let me rephrase...

- Technically, you can forget about on-page optimization and all other BS, and simply bulldoze your way to the first page of Google for a particular search term - if you can somehow get lots and lots of backlinks, from thousands and thousands of different websites, from all over the net to your webpage, using that search term as the anchor text.

Don't believe? Here's the classic proof:

Go to Google and type in 'click here' (without the quote). You will see that the top results are from Adobe Reader, Flash Player and Apple Quicktime. If you study these webpages, you will realize that the phrase 'click here' doesn't even appear on those webpages!

Hence the so-called 'On-page' optimization cannot be found in these webpages at all.

The only reason these webpages rank high for the phrase 'click here' is because there are probably tens of thousands of websites linking to these webpages using the phrase 'click here' as the anchor text - and you know why, don't you?

That's the power of link building (or Off-page optimization). That's all for today. If you think getting good ranking in Google is rocket science, think again.

Thanks to : Anders Eriksson

Ranking: 5