Step by Step SEO: Chapter 1

I am going to tell you how to optimize your website to get the max out of search engines.

First you need to know that SEO is not a thing which can bring you outcome overnight. Its a long process so the key of success in this field is......patience.

Dont worry, SEO isnt a rocket science either, anybody with a mix of logics and commen sense can do it..

So lets get it started..

How to Identify Your Competition

First you need to identify your competion, its very important, because you need to know who are you up against. To identify you competitors, open your favorite search engine and search for you most important and most relevant keyword for your site. All the sites listed on page 1 are your competitors. Closely analyze those sites to know what they have done to get that ranking. Including their contents, key word optimization and meta tags

How to use Link Tracking: locating the links TO a URL

Link tracking allows you to identify and choose possible sites that you will want as link partners once your site is content-rich and optimized. If these sites link to your competition, then you want them to also link to you! This is also done so that thesepotential link partners can be checked for META keywords that might be related to your site that were missed by your competition.

Links are vital to long-term Search Engine Optimization and ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you then you gain popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points, but if that site has few quality sites linking to it, you get only a few points. As such, a link from Microsoft.com would be worth more than a link from dodomake.com provided both had content similar to yours. In essence, if enough quality sites link to you then your site becomes a quality site by association. So you want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. Likewise, if you link to other quality sites then your site is assumed to be a quality site by association. However, the sites must be covering the same topics as your linking page in both directions. All other links are minimal importance (or in the case of spam they are ignored or even a penalty). And do not bother to buy hundreds of

URL's and cross link them or to buy into an advertising network. The search engines can locate them and filter them out faster than you can perform submission on these pages. At best they are short-lived.

Hint: you should also search for your own domain name in the major search engines. While this is not obvious, it is very informative, especially since you probably do not know who is actually linking to you. Search in Google using the following search format:

"e-greetingz.com -site:e-greetingz.com" (works for Yahoo as well). Replace e-greetingz.com with your domain name.

Now you know how to Identify your competition and the Importance of links.

In Next chapter I'll tell you how to identify suitable keywords for your site to traget.

Stay tuned..