For many beginners, creating a successful SEO campaign seems to be a daunting task mastered only by techie guys and those with extensive computer related backgrounds. In reality, it’s both true and false.

True in a sense that a successful SEO campaign is indeed a task that requires a lot of work one because of competition and two because search engines change the way they rank sites quite frequently to deliver high quality content to their customers.

And false because a successful SEO campaign can actually be achieved by everyone by just knowing the right principles behind it. I met one of the most famous young bloggers here in the Philippines who was able to rank #1 on a very competitive keyword “make money online” and he did it in just 5 months when he was just 13 years old! See his blog here.

And this is because he stuck with three basic principles, just like every other successful blogger out there.

#1 Know the keywords you want to rank for.

Every successful SEO campaign starts with “effective keyword research”.

The key to finding something is to know what you are looking for. And the key to being found is to knowing what you have to offer.

People look for things on the internet regularly and guess what they use to find what they are looking for, “keywords”! Keywords are the life blood of SEO and there are many tools you can use for this. Here are some of the ones I personally use.

• Wordtracker
• Google Keyword Tool
• Keyword Discovery

Now if you are looking for guides on how to do effective keyword research here are some references you can use.

• Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research – by Stoney deGeyter
• Keyword Research How I Do It – by Potpiegirl
• Keyword Research for Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide – By Brian Clark

Note this important principle every time you start a website or a blog or even to optimize an existing one.

Choose from 1-5 keywords you want to rank for in your site and use it relentlessly in all your campaigns.

#2 Organize your site to be easily indexed by the search engines.

This is usually called “onsite optimization” and let me explain this.

This step is just like in a bookstore where the books are organized by section so you can easily find what you are looking for. There is the arts section, computers section, fiction section, non-fiction, etc. I think you get what I mean.

Onsite optimization is all about arranging your blog so that the search engines can index it well and there are many ways to do this.

• Make sure your titles carry your main keywords
• Organize your blog into categories using your keywords as categories when possible.
• Make sure the body of your article contains the keywords you want to rank for.
• Arrange your permalink structure.
• Use SEO plug-ins to optimize your site. (I use Headspace 2 for my blogs)

Joost de Valk of www.yoast.com created a comprehensive guide on doing onsite optimization for wordpress blogs. You can find his article here.

Now the techie stuff usually ends here. The next principle is the most time consuming one but the most effective and this is where you will definitely spend most of your time on.

#3 Promote your site to the world and make friends.

Technically, this is called “offsite optimization” or “creating backlinks”!

Backlinks are basically links in the web that point back to your blog or pages in your blog that’s why it called “back” – “link”.

How do you achieve this? There are tons of ways to do it but the key principle is very simple.

1. Make content that is worth linking to
2. Make friends online

Of course there are strategies you can use as well like submitting to blog directories, social bookmarking, etc., but I like to keep the principles very simple and sustainable and I believe those two are the core ones. Content that is worth sharing and making friends.

I found this post on 9 ways to make worthwhile backlinks to your blog very helpful in doing a sustainable backlink building strategy.

Again the three principles for a successful SEO campaign

1. Know the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Organize your site to be easily indexed by search engines.
3. Promote your site to the world and make friends.

Happy blogging!

Charlie Aquino
Internet Entrepreneur

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