What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process of preparing a website or blog to rank highly in the organic results on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. You can get hung up on the technical details, but it really comes down to doing two things. Having lots of keyword rich content and getting other websites to link to your content.

These are the 10 steps needed to optimize your website the rights way.

1. Create a Plan: Create a master topic plan for your website that is narrowly focused on offering solutions to your market that matched the products or services you offer.
2. Choose Keywords using a keyword research tool such as Google’s keyword tool which is a free tool. Follow your master topic plan in selecting your keyword phrases and choose phrases that have a good traffic volume.
3. Use your keywords in the actual structure of your website. This means using keywords in your domain name, page names, folder names, etc. Use keywords in your navigation links.
4. Use keywords in the Meta tags. Use them in the Title, Description and Keyword tags. Each page should have about 4 keyword phrases that are highly relevant to the content on that page.
5. Write pages: Write your pages using your keywords you selected. Each optimized page should have 400-600 words of test and use each keyword phrase 1-2 times in the body text. These should be used as close to the top of your text as possible. Words used in the beginning of your content are considered more important by the search engines. In addition, use the keywords once in the page headlines and once in link text. This should link to another relevant page.
6. Emphasize keywords: Use the keywords phrase(s) in the Title Tag and where possible, use them in other emphasized text such as bold, italics, ordered lists and numbered lists. This signals the search engines that these phrases are important.
7. Links: Do get links back to your website from highly relevant blogs, authority sites, directories and other websites that are part of your industry.
8. Add a Blog to your website such as worpress.org. Adding a blog and writing original keyword rich content is one of the best ways to increase the size of your website and to attract links from other bloggers. Look here to read more tips about blog marketing.
9. Use Web Analytics to monitor progress. Watch not only your overall visitor count, but which keyword phrases are bringing visitors and from which search engines. Use feedback from your Analytics to make changes and improvements in your optimization.
10. Be patience. Search engine optimization is a long term commitment. The more competitive the phrase, the longer it will take to get top rankings.

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1. Search Engine Optimization Made Simple
2. SEO Dos & Don’ts (Part 1)
3. Optimizing Using Video SEO
4. 5 Easy Steps to Writing SEO Content
5. 5 Ways to Improve the SEO of Every Website You Design