The first step of any SEO strategy has to be to determine who is your target market and what do they want from your website. Until you know who you’re dealing with and what they want you can’t possibly be in a position to provide it to them and you can’t know what terms and phrases they’ll use to find a website.

Without know what keywords or search phrases to focus on you can’t begin to optimize your website. Once you’ve found this information then you can take some steps to help your site rank highly in the search engines. Some of these activities will be “on-page”, i.e. things on your actual website pages, and some will be “off-page” such as getting sites to link to yours. These activities collectively are known as search engine optimization (SEO).

A third element of an SEO campaign and one that is often forgotten by small business site owners is the ongoing monitoring of their websites visibility in the search engines. You need this information to see what’s working for your site and what isn’t so that you can “tweak” your activities or make any necessary adjustments to your site.

Always remember that SEO is not a quick fix solution. You’re not going to get your site into the no. 1 position on Google overnight, particularly for a competitive niche term. In fact, if you’ve found a way to do this then chances are it’s considered unethical or “black hat” SEO and is likely to get your site banned. You need to have a long term strategy that adheres to the search engines guidelines to get good rankings and maintain them.

Building free backlinks can be very time consuming but don’t underestimate how effective it can be in raising your site up in the search engines. After the investment of having the site built it seems crazy to not put in a bit of effort to make it actually work for you.

So what is link juice? Link juice refers to the benefit passed to your page from the page that contains the backlink. The term link juice was first used by a web marketing consultant Greg Boser. Google’s main measure of link juice is page rank. Page rank can, in effect, “leak” to your pages.

A page assumed to have more link juice if:

• It is indexed by the search engines
• It has a high page rank
• It doesn’t have too many outbound links
• It isn’t part of a link exchange
• It’s relevant to the site it is linking to (i.e. your site)
• The anchor text is on topic
• It has a high number of links pointing to it
• The site that the link is on is recognized as an authority site
• It doesn’t have the nofollow attribute

Links without the above criteria can still be of benefit to your site particularly in terms of traffic but they will not pass as much link juice so funnel most of your efforts in to finding backlinks with plenty of link juice.

To ensure that you get the maximum amount of link juice try to find relevant sites to get links from and try to make sure that they’re one way links. It used to be the case that you could ask a webmaster from another site if they’d provide you with a link and they would as long as you gave them a link back. A win win situation you would think. Well not anymore. Reciprocal linking used to be quite an effective way to build links but Google doesn’t pay a lot of attention to reciprocal links anymore because they know this is an unnatural means of linking, i.e. the links are artificially created by web owners wishing to rank well.

Another important element of your link building is to make certain that you get the right anchor text. Google’s advanced algorithms use the anchor text to help determine relevancy. When building backlinks always try to use your keyword in the anchor text. This will help pass on link juice.

Don’t create a large number of links from the same IP address. If you’ve found a blog where you can post comments or articles that is relevant to your site, don’t spend all your time submitting to them in the hope that you’ll get lots of links. Google wants to see a natural expansion of links to your site and this would occur over various websites not just a small few so make sure you spread out your link building activities.

Keep these points in mind when you’re working on your link building strategy and be gaining link juice and therefore search engine visibility quickly.

If you want Google or any of the other main search engines to rank your site highly in the coveted first few pages where most searchers remain then you need to spend some time thinking about search engine optimization (SEO).

There are a number of factors that you need to consider but the two key points that will make or break the success of your website in the search engines are:

1. The content it contains
2. The number of backlinks pointing to the site

It makes perfect sense that if you want to be found in the search engines for the phrase “yellow gold hubcaps” then your website needs to have content on it about “yellow gold hubcabs”. You can’t expect to rank highly for a phrase that you have no content on your site about. After all, Google wants to provide valuable search results to their users so that they remain users and Google retains the market share of search traffic. They’re not going to do that if they provide irrelevant results.

The second item may not be quite so obvious to new website owners. Basically a backlink is a hyperlink from another website back to your website. Google considers this a “vote” for your website and if the link comes from a quality, related site then it’s considered a very important “vote” and gives your site more credibility. The more credibility your site has, the higher up the search engine rankings it should appear.

Now the more competitive the keyword you’re hoping to rank highly for, the more backlinks you’re going to need. You can check how many backlinks your competition has by doing a Google search in the format:

link:[domainurl]

replacing [domainurl] with the url of the website you wish to check. For instance: I’ve just searched in Google for “dog clothes” the number 1 ranked site is www.glamourdog.com. If I now search in Google for link:www.glamourdog.com I can see that there are 74 links pointing to the site that Google recognizes. You will find that yahoo will find many, many more links pointing to the site but Google is far more choosy about what it considers a valid link and in most cases it’s Google we’re trying to impress.

If you’re hoping to rank for a very competitive niche then you may find the top sites have thousands of links so it’s important that you think about how you’re going to gain backlinks to your own site.