5 Components of a Well-Rounded SEO Program:

1. Keyword Research.

2. On-Page Factors

3. User Friendliness.

4. Article Writing.

5. Link Popularity.

Keyword Research.

The first step of any SEO campaign is to research your keywords, and even more important, is to get them right. You cannot skip this step. And why would you?

You may think you know what keywords to target, and you may be right about them, but what keywords are your potential visitors searching for? One example: You could have a travel site wanting to optimize for "discount tickets" when actually your visitors are searching for "cheap tickets". Another thing is the timeline to achieve results, like in the short, mid, or long-term. No unrealistic expectations here. One way I like to approach this is to optimize by levels. For example, I will choose 3 levels of difficulty and select the according keywords.

On-Page Factors.

The most important elements in the page are the Title, Headings within the copy and keyword focused content. Keeping your code compliant is also beneficial. On-page optimization a very important part of the process, but it is almost indirectly proportional with the competition levels for the given target keywords. So it is highly scored into rankings when present within low to medium levels, but less significant among high competitive terms. So keep this in mind, according to your market.

User Friendliness.

Site structure and overall navigation are being considered by search engines increasingly when ranking websites. So what are search engines looking for to determine and weight user friendliness? Coding errors, broken internal or when outbound links are bad. Fast loading pages, contextual links between pages, links

to authoritative sites or resources within related topics are good.

Article Writing.

Quality content still rules" Content that is topic centered, and highly focused on your target keywords is really what search engines are looking for. So when this is applied on multiple pages across your site, you get results. Because of this, context, not content, is king.

Link Popularity.

"Tell me who links to you and I will tell you who you are" is how search engine scoring works on link popularity. Just like content, the quality factor is very important. This is the most important element to consider when your site is on a highly competitive market. So make sure you have applied all the previous elements, in order to achieve link popularity from related sites, avoid links from bad neighborhoods, and make sure to never link to sites not indexed by Google.

Conclusion

Each of these topics deserves an article of its own (and then some). But I hope this prompts you to take the next step -- learning about each facet of a well-rounded search engine optimization program.

Does this approach work? I can say it does from firsthand experience. I have sites that rank well for highly competitive phrases, and they have sailed smoothly through all search engine updates over the last few years. They were all built using well-rounded SEO practices.