SEO is one of the most coveted areas in online knowledge, as it is an area that is critically important to understand to generate free search engine traffic.
If you are not getting search engine traffic for free, you are leaving traffic on the table.
There are two areas of SEO - on-page and off-page.
People often spend too much time on on-page optimization, working on things like keyword density and doing stupid things like keyword stuffing, and not enough time off-page.
But the bottom line is, it is the off-page that gets you traffic, that gets you rankings.
Now, you have to have the five basic areas of on-page optimization under control, but other than that, off-page is the way to go.
So what do you have to do to get the off-page optimization techniques under control? Well, the first thing to understand is that the primary focus of off-page optimization is creating backlinks to your web site.
You see, the search engines assume that if you have more backlinks to your website, that you must have a web site that is more 'popular' than other similar web sites.
Now, there is an issue of quality with the backlinks - but basically the worst a backlink should be able to do to you is nothing - of course, that makes it a waste of time if you get nothing out of it.
So here are the basics: 1)Write articles, put at least one text anchor link with your keyword in the text, in your articles, and submit them to the highest ranked article directories online.
2)Submit your url to the top ranked web directories online.
3)Use this option sparingly, because if someone you link to becomes banned by the search engines, they might lower your own ranking; if you use this method, put all your links in a similar location on your web site, and check them regularly for positive pagerank.
Here it is:Swap links with other web sites that have a similar theme to yours.
That's the basics, folks!