I was trying to come up with my next blog post and was going over in my mind what I was good at and what I was not good at. The long list was what I’m not good at, but I am pretty good at SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

So grab a cup of coffee, a pop or, my favorite, an ice cold beer and settle in because I’m going to tell you everything I know about SEO including “on page” and “off page”.

It’s really not rocket science but a lot of people try to make it seem more difficult than it is. There are no magic bullets or instant traffic formulas but if you follows the steps below you will get traffic and plenty of it.

On Page:

This is simple and although it dose not account for much of where the search engines will rank you, it is important. You should have the keyword or keyword phrase that you want to rank for in your Title, description and once or twice in the body of your content.

Your content needs to be ORIGINAL and written naturally. DO NOT try to stuff your article with the keyword you are trying to rank for. That’s all there is to “on page”.

A quick note about keywords:

When choosing your keywords try to get into the minds of the searcher. Are they just beginning their search? Are they looking for more information? Or are they ready to BUY! Look at these 3 keywords

  • Cookies
  • Chocolate Chip Cookies
  • Mrs Smiths’ Chocolate Chip Cookies

Which of these 3 do you think is ready to buy? If you picked the last one you’re right.

Which would you rather have? 1000 visitors a day that bring you 2 sales or 50 that bring you 7 sales. The amount of traffic you get is not as important as the type of traffic you get and the buying words are often much less competitive!

Off Page:

This is where the rankings come from and it all about links. If you get the right links you will get rankings. How do I get links? What kind of links do I need? How many do I need? I’m glad you asked.

In today’sWeb 2.0 Internet this is not as hard (or as expensive) as it once was. Links are there for the taking as long as you are willing to put in a little work. How many links you need depends on how much competition there is for the keyword you are trying to rank for ( to find competition search for the word or phrase in Google with quotes around it). If you keep the competition below 30,000 you will not need that many links to rank.

The type of links are not as important as having a variety of types. Don’t just have social bookmarks or forum posts orSquidoo (Hubpages etc.) or blog comments but have some of each. And here’s something that is different from what most people are saying: they don’t all have to be from sites related to your niche!

Think about it. Dose CNN only have links from other news sites? Are all the links coming to Adobe only from other photo software companies? Of course not.

You want your link profile to look natural. This also means not using the same anchor text in all of your links. Mix it up. Use several variations of your keyword and a few that are just your web site (mywebsite .com) or “click here”. The search engines — especially Google — are becoming much smarter and you need to take that into consideration.

Another thing to consider in looking “natural” is not to have too many links showing up too fast. When first getting started don’t add more than 6 or 7 links a day and vary that number. Get 3 links one day, 7 the next and maybe none the next and 4 the day after that.

This last point really relates to “on page” but I thought that it fit in better here. Link out from your site to an authority site or two. Don’t use keywords that you are trying to rank for but do link to them. This looks natural and will give you credibility with the search engines. It will Associate you with these authority sites.

Many people don’t seem to understand that links pass good things (or bad) in both directions. I have had Google send someone to a site of mine from the anchor text in an outbound link. That was the only place on the site that the phrase was used and yet in my stats it showed a visitor from Google using that search phrase.

Building A Free Mini-Network:

One great way to get free quality links to your site is to build your own mini-network in the same niche as your web site. You do this using Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Xanga, Wetpaint, Wordpress.com,Blogger, Multiply and Vox. This is very powerful!

You can get a free account at all of these web sites (and others) plus they are extremely easy to use. Let me make a quick point here: DO NOT let any of this intimidate you. Getting started in something new always seems overwhelming at first but just do it. All of these sites will walk you through the process of setting them up. I know that you can do this.

You will need to have some content related to your niche for each of these Web 2.0 sites. If you are not a good writer you can outsource this (www.needanarticle.com is very reasonable) or rewrite articles you find on one of the article directories like www.goarticles.com. But don’t use them as is, rewrite them. Did you notice that I just linked out to 2 authority sites?

Once you have your content start building your sites. The first site that you build and your main web site will be the focus of your linking from the others. When I build one of these mini-nets I’ll use 3-5 of these sites. You can put them in any order you like but if you use WordPress.com put it in the 1st or 2nd position because they frown on large numbers of outbound links.

You do not want to put any affiliate links on these sites. They should be purely informational.

Your first Web 2.0 site will have 2 links on it in this order:

  1. Your main site
  2. An authority site

The second Web 2.0 site will have 3 links on it:

  1. Your Main Site
  2. Your first web 2.0 site
  3. A different authority site

Your third Web 2.0 site will have 4 links on it:

  1. Your main site
  2. Your first Web 2.0 site
  3. Your second Web 2.0 site
  4. Another authority site

The fourth Web 2.0 site will have 5 links on it:

  1. Your main site
  2. The first Web 2.0 site
  3. The second  Web 2.0 site
  4. The third Web 2.0 site
  5. Yet another authority site

The last Web 2.0 site will have 6 links on it:

  1. Your main site
  2. Web 2.0 site #1
  3. Web 2.0 site #2
  4. Web 2.0 site #3
  5. Web 2.0 site #4
  6. And you guessed it another authority site

Now go out and do the same things for these Web 2.0 sites that you did for your main site. Social bookmarking, blog commenting etc. etc. and these sites all have RSS feeds. So submit all the RSS feeds to a feed aggregator like Feedage.com.

The only thing left to do is add some new content to these sites every few days for a couple of weeks. There you have it, your own mini-network that will pass major link juice to your main site.

Thanks for reading all the way through to the end. Put this into action and the time spent will be well worth it.

To your success