What is SEO? SEO is the art or technique of placing a web site or blog on the first page of Google or any other of the search engine results pages. The purpose of getting your site on the first page of Google and the other major search engines results pages is to drive more traffic to your web site. The reason you need more traffic is to make more sales and make more money.

The amount of traffic that your web site gets is relative to the amount of revenue that your site generates; without traffic your site will not generate any revenue. There are a number of ways that you can generate traffic, one is to use Google Ad Sense but this can be a bit on the pricey side as the cost per click can be quite expensive depending on the key words that you want your ad to appear for.

Another way to generate traffic is to use a sponsored listing; a sponsored listing is an ad that appears on the very top of the search results page normally highlighted in pink on the Google page. Again this is a paid option and can be on the expensive side. It can also be difficult to get a sponsored placement as they are only available in limited numbers.

Another way to generate traffic is for free is through the organic listings, these are the sites that appear on the left hand side of the results pages. You don’t have to pay for placements in this section but it does take a lot of time and effort to place a web site on the first page of Google.

So how do you go about placing your site in the top ten rankings, the first step is to start a search engine optimisation campaign. Starting with your own web site, make sure that all your on page factors are in order and more importantly make sure that your site contains useful , informative and unique content. Make sure that all the other on page factors are correct, title tag, Meta tag, and h1 tags are also an important part of on page SEO. You should also make sure that your page has a good download time sub 3 second is recommended.

A link building campaign is also needed, without back links to your site you will not stand a chance, you need to build quality back links from reputable sites, the best type of back links are from articles and blog posts. This type of back link is called a contextual back link as the link is placed in the body of the post or article.

There are other ways of building back links but I personally don’t rate them, and think they are a waste of time and effort, blog commenting, forum posting and so on. You can spend a lot of time creating profiles and placing links in forums only to find that you have had you link removed and your account closed by the forum moderator.  The same applies to blog commenting you can spend time commenting on posts that you really don’t have any interest in to find that your comment has not been approved. You are better off writing articles and blog posts, because you are guaranteed a decent quality link back to your site.

Another good way of link building is directory submissions, this is a time old method but it is still quite affective in terms of SEO. The only snag it is time consuming and tedious and in some case your link may not be approved for months.

If you are planning a link building campaign then plan a progressive and not an aggressive campaign as to many links to fast can damage you rankings. To many links to quickly will look unnatural to the likes of Google and you site may get penalised. Build your links gradually over time and at a regular frequency and vary your anchor text.