There is a notion among some ( mostly laymen ) that SEO is “free advertising -24/7″. That is, once you optimize your site, millions of people having found your site on some search engine, will click through to your site and will do business with you.

To an extent, this notion of “free advertising” is not completly inaccurate. SEO can result in your site being found – free of cost – resulting in massive increase in traffic to your site. SEO is free, once you have invested – invested in resources ( people, tools ) and invested in time. Even the, SEO is not quite that simple.

SEO takes work – hard, and sustained work, over a period of time. For those who think that only keywords and submision is necessary, below is a líst of some of the typical SEO activities that can result in higher search engine rankings.

Researching and selecting keywords that are relevant to your target audience

Researching competition for keywords

Researching and analyzing competitive websites

Evaluating website content for keyword occurence, and creating additional pages, if necessary.

Making sure that title and meta tags on all the pages accurately reflect the content of web pages.

Initiating a link building program to your site from other sites (directories, exchanged links,article marketing, etc.)

Regularly monitor all the search engines and your competitors positions

Doesn’t quite sound as simple as some people think. That’s because it’s not. Just think of this … every other site – whether on first, second or third page is trying to outsmart you. You work hard, and are able to put your site above your competitors. The competitor works harder and beats you to to the top. Its a war out there and SEO’s are war strategist, working day in and day out, for the best interst of their clients.

You must be wondering what’s the way out ? If you don’t have time,patience and skill required for search engine optimization ( you are surely going to need all of them ), it’s better to outsource your seo work to those who don’t have these qualities in short supply. And focus on other aspects of your business. You will save not only time, but your peace of mind !

All links are NOT equal. Some links will surely be considered more important as far as Google’s algorithm is concerned. The following criteria must be satisfied in order for a link to be considered a quality link -

• How relevent the linking page is with the subject matter of your site.

  A site selling sports goods linking to a real estate site, will do good to neither of them.

• The PageRank of the site pointing to you site.

  Ideally, the pagerank of the site linking to your’s site should be higher. But if pagerank is equal or less than that of your site, you should go ahead with link exchange, provided the subject matter of both sites match closely.

• How relevent the anchor text to the page it links to.
• The number of other links on the page pointing to your site, the less, the better.

Always remember , links from a unrelated site are pretty much worthless

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.