It seems that nowadays every single person on the Internet has their own Secrets Of Search Engine Optimization product or software package that theyd like to sell you.  Some of the products or information are good and worthwhile, but most of them are just old ideas in new packaging.  The thing is, though, most of the people who buy these programs aren’t anywhere near the level they could attain with just three simple tenets of SEO that every webmaster should follow:

Simple Site Architecture:
Search engines use small pieces of software called ìspidersî to ìcrawlî your website and catalog the different pages and content it contains.  Keep you site architecture and navigation as simple as possible.  No buried subpages, no ridiculously specific Category headings on blogs.  If you canít reach any page in your site within three or four clicks, then itís too complicated (excluding scrolling through blog archives, of course, which will require more clicks as you make more entries).  This philosophy also applies to how your URLs look.  Keep them simple and direct.  And last but not least, build an XML sitemap (there are a lot of free tools that do this automatically, especially for blogs) and submit it to a search engine.

Build Links:
This is a tough one for the novice webmaster, but the fact remains that if you want to get higher search rankings, one of the best ways to do that is to get high-profile sites to link to you.  Donít succumb to the lure of link farms and pay-for-link scams; one genuine link from a well-established site is worth a thousand of them.  Try to build relationships with the people who run popular sites in your market (commenting on their blogs is a great way to introduce yourself), and the links will come eventually.

Good Content:
This one is pretty simple:  write content that people want to read, donít write for search engines.  If you stuff a bunch of keywords into your content, viewers will notice and be more likely to click away.  You may go up a rank or two in search results, but whatís the point when no visitor stays on your site for more than 15 seconds?  That said, do make sure that your keywords are included in the titles and headers of your web pages, and also in the tags of blog entries.

Keeping It Simple With SEO learn more here: OutsourceSeoStrategy.com

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Getting front-page, organic search engine rankings is the holy grail of search engine optimization.  It is also a lot of work and a time consuming process.  And, most of the time, you won’t succeed on making it to the front page for competitive keywords.

So, with all that potential for failure, why not run a series of tests on your keywords before getting into the down and dirty SEO tactics of building links or optimizing individual pieces of content?  It ís not nearly as hard as you would think, and odds are, you’re already doing a version of this test as part of your business.

The perfect SEO test
The perfect mechanism for such testing is already in place, and you probably already use it:  Pay Per Click advertising.  The idea is to drive traffic to a landing page with a basic opt-in mailing list through paid advertising in order to test whether or not a specific set of keywords can be profitable.

If, for example, you run this test campaign for 1,500 visitors, and only three or four of them convert, then that particular keyword probably isnít worth the hours upon hours of optimization work you had planned to do.  Yes, it will cost you money initially to run the PPC campaign, but in the long run you will be able to precisely determine which keywords to focus on, which will make you money in the end.
Pitfalls?
The main pitfall to avoid while running this test is confusing traffic with potential earnings.  If you run a targeted PPC campaign and drive a lot of traffic immediately, you may think to yourself that these keywords must be profitable because traffic has arrived so quickly.

Conclusion
This is not necessarily the case.  Traffic is only valuable if the people making up that traffic (or at least a percentage of them) perform the actions necessary to earn you money.  If you’re running a website for a hobby and just want to share content with like-minded people, then the more traffic the better.  But if youíre running a business, the more targeted traffic the better.  Using PPC campaigns to test the potential profitability of keywords prior to launch a full-fledged search engine optimization project can be one of the most useful tools in your arsenal if used correctly…

Test Keywords Before Search Engine Optimization learn more here: OutsourceSeoStrategy.com

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