Think about it for a moment.

The aim of all the search engines is to provide fresh, original content to the person looking for it. Once you understand that statement, SEO becomes really easy.

Now you understand what the search engines are looking for, it follows that a web page needs to meet the following criteria to rank well:

- it needs to have original content - the content needs to be clearly defined - the page needs to contain high quality content

What this means to you as an internet marketer or publisher is:

- you need to write your own content - you need to focus key elements of your web page around your keywords - you need to write quality content that people will value and want to share

How well you need to do the above three elements in order to rank well depends on how competitive your targeted keywords are?

The more competitive your keyword phrase is, the bigger the challenge you'll face to achieve a high ranking for it. If there are only a few sites competing for it, it won't take too much effort to get ranked on the first page of Google. Original, focused content will do the job.

But, when the competition increases and you start to compete with thousands if not millions of other pages, you'll need more than well focused, original content, you'll need quality as well, and lots and lots of inbound links!

Why? Well lets consider exactly how the search engines measure quality

It's pretty simple in practice. The search engines count how many sites link to your content. A link coming in to your page from another webmaster's site is seen as a recommendation. Therefore, the more pages you compete with for your chosen keyword phrase, the more inbound links you need for your pages to rank highly.

Not all recommendations are worth as much as others though. A recommendation from a recognised expert carries a lot more value than from a non-expert! If a web site is seen as an authority site in your niche, and you get a link from it, it will be worth a lot more to your ranking than a link from a new site in an unrelated niche.

SEO is that simple! Experts try and over complicate it so they can sell you their products and services.

Simply place your keywords in your page title, page header and a few times in the content of your article, and then get lots of sites to link to your page.

Keywords and Links equal High Rankings!

The main reason that so many would be marketers fail at SEO, is purely because they want to rank highly overnight for competitive keywords! It simply won't happen.

Getting lots of free traffic from the search engines requires lots of time, effort and focus.

Apply all three of those, and you'll succeed at SEO.