I have been blessed due to the fact that I am not a "true" webmaster, but I have still been able to achieve high search engine rankings for a number of keyword phrases that I need to dominate my niche markets. You can get great search engine rankings by following a few simple techniques and then by focusing on creating your site for real people. I share this information with you today because I constantly see programs that will help improve your search engine rankings, but I honestly believe that most of them aren't very effective.

One example of the programs in which I don't waste my time is the many link building programs across the web. Even though link building can be very important, my suggestion is that you just let inbound links come naturally. If you have a good website, then people will link to you. Also, if you get the chance to set up a simple affiliate program, then even more people will link to you.

I recently read an article that said that some websites with Google page ranks of 7 or higher will actually let you pay them thousands of dollars per month in order for them to link to your website. All I can say is: WOW! You better hope that the search engines don't find out! If you haven't heard, there can be some serious consequences for websites that have been discovered buying or selling link placement.

O.K., so I would like to cover a couple of things that you can do to get easy and effective SEO without spending a dime. Also, by following these steps, people will eventually start to naturally link to your website. Let's start off by further explaining the power of having a blog on your site. A blog is a really easy way in order for you to build tons of good content for your website and to start getting more links. Many bloggers discover that they can get a lot of free exposure to their blogs in a short period of time.

Let me share an example: For one of my sites, I got "slapped" by Google for the critical keyword phrases that I needed to advertise my business. This means that Google wanted to charge me between $5 and $10 per click for those keyword phrases. In an attempt to fix things, I decided that I should add a blog to that same website. After only a few weeks of posting, Google had started ranking my website naturally for the same keyword phrases that they wanted $5 and $10 a click for! Why did Google change their minds? Well, it was due to the simple fact that I started easily creating pages and pages of quality content through the blog that focused directly on those keyword phrases. When it comes to SEO, content is king, and if you can start to grow a nice blog, then you will grow content fast.

At times Google and other search engines will start naturally visiting your website in order to spider, index and rank your pages, but this can sometimes take months to happen unless you follow this next huge tip. This tip is to provide Google and Yahoo with sitemaps to your website. It isn't very hard to figure out how to do this, and your website will start to get spidered and ranked pretty fast, all for just providing the search engines with a "map" to your website! Just go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools in order to start submitting a sitemap to Google, or for Yahoo you can head on over to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. If you don't know how to write a sitemap, then there are also programs across the web that will do it for you.

One last piece of simple SEO advice that I have to share with you is that you should still include titles and meta tags in the html of your web pages. You are also going to want to make sure that you "theme" these pages. Even though the search engines don't rank your websites according to the titles and meta tags like they did in the past, the search engines will still use these titles and tags as a "guide" in order to see what type of content you are providing. When you provide these titles and tags, you will want to make sure you use similar keyword phrases within the body of your web page. For example, if you had a web page on grocery savings, you would want to maybe have the title say "The Grocery Savings Zone." You would also want to make sure that the content on that page mentioned grocery savings a few times, and you would also want to have your meta tags include phrases similar to grocery savings.

Following these 3 simple techniques for SEO together will prove to be most effective. As you grow your blog, your new posts will be easily spidered, indexed, and ranked because of your sitemap submissions. Also, by providing titles and meta tags on your other web pages, you will easily allow the search engines to discover the main themes for your site. Before you know it, you will see high search engine rankings for a number of your pages all because you followed a few basic and effective techniques.