SEO. What exactly is it? In simple terms, it is making it so that the search engines will place your web page high up in the search rankings. So if you had a site on say, "Gardening", if somebody were to go to a search engine and do a search on the keyword "gardening" your site would land somewhere in the first 3 pages and preferably on page 1 somewhere near the top of the page.
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 credit for having your link on these pages. But then, as the search engines 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 always 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.
Implementing SEO brings traffic to your site which hlps to make money online.