The Secret to Effective SEO

What is the secret to SEO? Well, I’m going to tell you right now. All you have to do is have great content that incorporates the keywords search users will be using to find what you have to offer, design your site in a way that can be easily crawled by search engine spiders, and get relevant, inbound links pointing to the pages on your site. That’s it. Pretty simple, eh.

If it is so easy then why is there a whole industry built around it? It’s because knowing SEO and actually doing it are two different things. SEO is actually a bit more complicated than I made it out to be in the opening paragraph, you do need to know some of the details of what search engines look for, but it really isn’t that hard to learn. You could just read Aaron Wall’s SEO book and read up on some good SEO blogs such as such as SEOmoz and SEM Research be an expert in no time. However, as I have already stated SEO is more than just know how.

A big part of SEO is getting relevant inbound links to the pages on your site. This can be accomplished in many ways. Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall have put together a pretty comprehensive list of link building ideas here. However, to be a really effective SEO you are going to have to be little creative and have some marketing and business skills. You need to be able to come up link building ideas and implement them in a cost effective manner. It is pretty easy to get a lot of traffic from the search engines with some know how and a little effort, however, It is the SEO that can leverage their resources in creative ways to get the most out of their money and efforts that are most successful. Effective SEO really just comes down to effective marketing, creating buzz about you site and getting people to link to you naturally. If you want to be an effective SEO learn as much as you can about marketing, then supplement that knowledge with some basic information on how the search engines work.

So what is the "secret" to SEO? It's simply good Marketing.

Chris Sandberg is an independent internet marketer. He writes about search engine and social media marketing at the SEM Research Blog.