With over 100 million domains registered the Internet has become a crowded place. With so many more businesses competing for high search engine rankings, it is crucial to incorporate SEO into any successful web presence strategy. A web site without SEO is an exercise in futility. Having a great looking website with every feature you have dreamed of is meaningless without SEO.

SEO = Traffic = $

Visitors make any web presence a success, and there will not be any visitors without SEO. No web site today can be successful without proper search engine marketing. There are two fundamental elements to search engine optimization, onsite optimization and offsite optimization.

Onsite Search Engine Optimization

Onsite optimization has to do with optimizing the web site content for your target keywords. If your web site wants to rank for the keyword phrase “search engine optimization experts”, you have to make sure the phrase is part of your web site content. Therefore, the page title, page text content, Meta and other tags should be optimized for your target keyword. One page should not be optimized for too many keywords. Instead, each web page should be optimized for a unique keyword. For example, the home page could be optimized for “search engine optimization”, another web page for “seo expert”, and another for “seo consultant”, etc. Onsite optimization is important, but is not terribly effective on its own. It requires offsite optimization.

Offsite Search Engine Optimization

Offsite optimization is the only way to achieve high search engine rankings for competitive keywords. In other words, if there are other businesses competing for the same keywords you want to rank for, you must have offsite optimization.

Offsite optimization is all about links. Links are like gold when it comes to getting high rankings. Without links your site will not achieve high rankings. Links are considered votes by search engines, the more links you have pointing to your web site from other sites the more important your site is. Links tell the search engines that others think that your web site is valuable, and valuable site are ranked higher.

Beware of Guarantees

Some companies will guarantee page one search engine rankings, but reputable companies would never do that. It is impossible to for an seo expert to guarantee ranking for any competitive set of keywords. Search engine optimization is a process of continuous improvement. You can expect improvements, but it is unrealistic to expect to be number one for a very competitive keyword phrase.

Be Patient

As you know, the competition for high rankings is fierce. It is unreasonable to expect high rankings for competitive keywords for a brand new web site. Search engines value the age of a web site. The older a web site the easier it is to improve its ranking. Don't expect to knock out your competition by putting up a web site one day and expect to beat them in the rankings by next month. It is not uncommon for new sites to take six months to a year to get decent rankings for competitive keywords.