Effective Search Engine Optimization - Learn how to be Number 1 in the Rankings.

Search engine optimization is an important skill that any webmaster can learn. Most people are just too intimidated by it and try to hire others to do it. This is fine if you have the money to do it however many new internet marketers do not have the budget to pay for someone to optimize their site and help them get more free organic search engine traffic. If you need a web host then consider Hostgator (click here) as they offer low cost unlimited sites and have reliable customer service.

So for all the new internet marketers, remember that learning search engine optimization is really not that difficult. Just start slow and over time you'll become an seo expert. Of course the first step is that you need to have a website that is going to offer either a product or service that you have created or you are going to market affiliate products.

Before you even pick a domain name, make sure you do your market research to make sure that there is market for your intended products. Once you have decided that there is a market, by the way you can easily determine if there is a market just by doing a search on the free overture keyword tool at http://inventory.overture.com/. If your related keywords get over 50,000 searches a month then there is a good market.

Now, you need to select a main keyword that your site will be targeting. It is a good idea that this keyword have also 50,000+ searches. So once you have your main keyword, let's do a competition analysis. You can do this by simply entering your keyword in Google and checking the number of results that pop up. If you are brand new to internet marketing, go for keywords and niches that have under 2 million results in Google. As you gain experience you will know how to dominate the more competitive terms but at the start go with the low competition so you can get traffic faster and thus make money faster.

So you have a main keyword selected and you know that there are plenty of buyers in your niche so you can actually market products and services to them so you can make money. Now you need to register a domain name based on the main keyword. If you can get a domain name actually be the keyword, that is best otherwise try adding numbers at the end such as '101' or you can add modifiers like 'top', 'best', or 'great' etc.

Now you have a domain selected, next step is to create your site. For the index page, insure that the main keyword appears in H1 and H2 tags, you can bold the keyword once in the text - however try to make it appear natural and also add the keyword a maximum of once in each paragraph. Do not stuff the keyword in your page, less is more. Also add the keyword once towards the end of the page. Do not obsess over keyword density and such as these factors are overused and search engines do not pay much attention to them anymore.

Also make sure to have a privacy statement, contact us, sitemap and about us link on each page. This gives your site an added level of credibility to both visitors and the search engines. Ok, so your site is now created, it does not need to have a ton of pages to do well, however make sure that your template is unique and that your content is 100% unique. Do not use articles from article directories because they will not rank well on your site as it is considered duplicate content.

Again, less is more and you are better off having a few quality 'unique' pages than thousands of duplicated pages. A unique site will last in the search engines forever, trust me, the search engines are very smart now and can detect whether or not the content on your site is copied or whether you actually created it yourself using your own words and style.

All right, you also want to make sure that you have the keyword in the title, try to make your title catchy, something people will want to click on but keep in under 80 character. As for the description meta tag, make sure to include your keyword in it and again make the description attractive and something someone will click on, think of it as an ad for your webpage.

The keywords meta tag is important but I recommend not adding more than 5-10 keywords. Simply add 5-10 related keywords including your main keyword and that should be good enough. There is no point putting hundreds of keywords in there because the search engines will just ignore them and may even penalize you for keyword stuffing.

So your site is now optimized, at least the on page aspect of it is now complete. Now we need to focus on the more important off page optimization. Off page optimization involves getting links back to your site that have your main keyword in it. There are many ways to do this such as reciprocal linking, using forums and writing articles.

The best kind of links are one way links and the best way to get these is through writing and submitting articles. All you need to do is write an article related to the topic of your site, around 500 - 700 words, keep the paragraphs short and the content quality very high and thoroughly researched. Once you have created your article you need to submit it to article directories, some the top ones are:

Ezinearticles.com
Goarticles.com
A1articles.com

You can do a search for 'article directory' on google to find many more. Submit to as many as you can. Now the great thing about articles is that you can place links back to your site in the author bio box. Make sure to put anchor text links that contain your main keyword pointing back to your homepage.

Over time you will start getting links back to your site and also some traffic as people click on those links and visit your site so there are great benefits to article writing and it is 100% free. It just requires a bit of elbow grease however there are many making six figures a year using this seo strategy alone so it is enormously powerful.

As you can see, there is nothing complex about seo and really take it slowly. It is a long term plan, it can take anywhere from 6-12 months to see good traffic from the search engines so don't keep checking your rankings daily. If you want more immediate traffic, use pay per click but make sure to watch your budget closely as it can get expensive. I recommend you do both as there benefits to both approaches of paid and free traffic generation. Do you want to gain an unfair advantage in the search engine optimization game? Try SEO Elite to help you master search engine optimization and outrank all your competitors quickly and easily. Click here to learn more.