Essential SEO Tools & Resources

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) does not have to be complicated; in fact it’s pretty straightforward in reality.

Think about it … all the search engines are trying to achieve, is to serve up quality content on the exact subject matter the surfer is looking for. It really is as simple as that.

So it makes sense that a web page needs to meet the following criteria to rank well:

- it needs to be original content
- the content needs to be clearly defined as to exact subject matter
- the content needs to be of high quality

What this means to you as a webmaster is:

- you need to write your own content if you want it to rank well (or have someone else write it for you)
- you need to focus the key elements of your web page around your keywords
- you need to write quality content that people will value and want to share with others

How well you need to do the above three things depends on one thing. How competitive your chosen keywords are?

Simply put, the more pages there are on the web competing for your chosen keyword phrase, the harder it will be for you to rank highly for that phrase. If there are only a dozen sites competing with you, it won’t take a lot to get on the first page of Google. Original, well focused content will do the trick.

However, when the competition increases and you start to compete with thousands if not millions of other pages, you’ll need more than well focused, original content, you’ll need quality as well.

So how exactly do the search engines measure quality? It’s a pretty subjective thing to quantify.

Well, its pretty simple in practice. The search engines count how many sites link to your content. A link from another site is seen as a recommendation, in as much as the other site wants to share your content with it’s own readers.

Therefore, the more pages you compete with for your chosen keyword phrase, the more links you need to get pointing to your pages to rank well in the search engines.

Now, as in the online world, not all recommendations carry equal weight. When you get a testimonial from a recognised expert, it carries a lot more kudos than from Joe Bloggs! It’s the same online. If a web site is seen as an authority site in your niche, and you get a link from it, it will be worth a lot more to your ranking than a link from a new site in an unrelated niche.

SEO is simple, experts try and over complicate it in an effort to make money from selling their services.

One of the biggest problems with SEO, is that people want to rank highly overnight for competitive keywords, and there willing to spend money on fast track methods that accelerate the process!

Even when these methods work, usually “blackhat” techniques, they’re short term successes. Ultimately, the search engines discover the short cuts and penalise the sites.

Getting lots of traffic from the search engines requires three things:

- time
- effort
- focus

These are the three reasons most internet marketers give up! They’re not prepared to wait for results, they want overnight success. For most of us, overnight riches are not going to be showered on us.

Traffic from the search engines takes time to appear in volume, it requires effort and focus, and it needs a systematic plan to make it happen.

In my next post I’ll take you through my systematic approach to getting good search engine rankings.

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