SEO is a Four Chapter Book

I often refer to SEO as a four chapter book. Even though there is a lot more to it than just four tasks, the basic premise of it can be summed up pretty easily.

Chapter One - Research. Research. Research. You will be doing mostly keyword research and competitive analysis in this chapter. You will need keyword tools, your favorite search engine and plenty of time.

Chapter Two - This is when you will optimize the content on each page to be useful for both humans and search engines. You will be using your creative writing skills and keyword placement techniques to entice the search engines and your readers. In this chapter you will create new pages to act as landing and conversion pages. You may even add new pages just to host page copy. Most of the techniques that you will be utilizing will be based on knowing where to put your keywords, and your ability to write creatively.

Chapter Three - In this chapter you will be building what is known as Backlinks. Backlinks are links that point to your page from another website. This is by far one of the most important elements to getting good rankings on Google. Again, you are using your creative writing skills to write articles and posts on niche forums, blogs and e-zines. This process is by far the most time consuming, and should be done over time. Google doesn't like when a site with no backlinks all of the sudden has a bunch of links in a short amount of time. You will focus primarily on getting as many backlinks to your site as possible. However, you must choose quality links and never trade or purchase them. Google will actually penalize your site for paid or reciprocal linking.

Chapter Four - Once you have a high rank it is not over. You must keep up with the things that you did in chapter 1 through 3. However, at this point it should be easier to manage and most of your time will be spent checking links, tweaking content and creating more backlinks. In this chapter you will also be tracking your results to see how all of your time has been paying off.

Most of all you must know that SEO takes time, and is a work in progress type of project. Thinking of it in a four chapter process will help you digest the information into comprehensible steps. So now that you understand the basic chapters, you need to fill in the pages between them. These pages will hold the key to the techniques that you need to use to get your site ranking in the first two pages of Google. Once you have these, the puzzle will be complete and you can start getting higher rankings in no time.