In practice, this is a whole other ballgame. Why? Because the search engines, which years ago used to be predictable, continuously change the rules on us and make life just plain difficult. For example, when FFA pages first came out and people would post their links to these FFA pages, the search engines would include these pages in their listings and give you began to realize that nobody actually went to these pages, they stopped including them in their listings. Now, all those links that people had out there turned out to be worthless. People's search engine rankings for their sites began to plummet overnight. Most people had no explanation for it. But the ones who took the time to find out, either through insider information or just trial and error, realized that posting to FFA sites wouldn't help your SE ranking and only hurt it. So they started putting out reports on this and made money through those reports.

The point is, SEO is constantly changing because the rules are changing. However, having said that, there are some strategies which are basic and will never change. If you master these strategies and use them all the time, you have a decent chance of working your way up the search engines. Some techniques work better than others and there are some shortcuts that we can use today to help get us up the search engines a little quicker. Will those shortcuts work tomorrow? Nobody really knows. But for the purposes of what works today, we're going to include those shortcuts into the following articles.

Just a disclaimer before we actually get into the ABCs of SEO. Because of the volatile nature of search engines, I make no guarantees that the methods you are about to read are going to land you on page one. For one thing, it is a lot harder to land on the first page of the search engines when you're competing with 10 million other sites. It's a lot easier if you only have a few thousand sites to deal with. That is one of the things that you're going to learn throughout this series, how to pick a niche where you will have the best chance of getting a top spot on the search engines. One other thing you need to be aware of. Each SE has its own criteria, so landing on page one of a particular search engine doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to land on page one on ALL the search engines. That's why you want to concentrate on the main search engines and just a few of them. Over time, the rest will come.

SEO is quite a war. Many today are winning the war because of some of these methods.

So sit back and get yourself prepared for one very intense tutorial on SEO.

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Okay, let's dive right into SEO from the beginning. That would be with your niche. The biggest mistake that people make when trying to do SEO is that they don't bother to do research on their niche first to see what kind of demand there is for it and how much competition they have. They pretty much dive right in only to find out later that they are going against 19 million pages in that niche and only 2,000 monthly searches. Good luck trying to win this search engine war. Wake me when you've reached your 100th birthday.

Brad Cullen's first chapter of his free giveaway book (it's nice to be so rich that you can just give stuff away) was called "Optimize the Wrong Keywords and You'll Most Likely Never See Results." No truer words were ever spoken. And yet, so many people never get this. They want to throw up a site with the keywords "Home Business" and expect to see results. They'd have a better chance of winning the National Lottery Draw.

Brad explains how you have to really get into the basement of a niche. Well, those weren't his words, but that's really what he meant. Today we call them long tail keywords. These are the keywords that are down at the end of the search chain. Now, a lot of people might immediately think, "How can that do me any good? If few people search using these keywords, how do I get traffic?" Well, we'll get to that shortly. The point is, you have absolutely no chance going against the big boys of "Home Business" or "Weight Loss" or any of the other, what I call, "main keywords." The reason is because everybody and their grandmother is optimizing on those keywords. So to have a prayer with SEO, you have to go through the other route.

Now, that isn't to say that someday you're not going to incorporate these main keywords into your SEO. You will, but you have to get in through the back door first. Then you can start pulling in traffic from some of the major keywords.

So let's say you're in the niche of ?weight loss?, which is a very big one today. The first thing you need to do is go to a keyword suggestion tool (I use Wordtracker) and find out what some of the long tail keywords are that maybe don't have as much competition.

Here is the URL that you need to go to in order to look these keywords up.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Okay, so let's go there and look up "weight loss"

As you can see, the weight loss main keyword has over 12,000 searches a month as of this printing. That's a lot of searches. But if you go to the Google search engine and look to see how many sites come up under the keyword "weight loss" you will find that it is over 45 million sites. Think you have a shot in Hades of putting a dent in this market?

Okay, let's run down our keyword list to something that doesn't quite have as much competition.

Let's look at "weight loss spells" Hey, don't laugh. It was searched for about 63 times last month.

If you look at the number of sites that are optimized for that keyword, it's only about 22,000.

Now THAT is a much more manageable number.

See where we're going with this?

Good. Next article we'll pick it up from here.