Search engine marketing is not the black art that many think it is, but it is a science.  To be successful you need time, a clear keyword strategy linked to well written content, a strong linking strategy, and a socialising strategy.  A good rule of thumb is “first you must give to receive”.  So what does this mean in reality. 

Keyword Strategy

Choosing the right keywords and then optimising your content for those keywords is the key to success, but to get a high ranking for those keywords is an enormous challenge.  For the small business owner, rather than competing with the popular keywords, a better strategy is to go local initially, for example web design sutton, and then optimise your content over time for more keywords where there is less competition.

Articles

It is well known that content is king in terms of improving your search engine ranking so people started churning out articles that were full of optimized key words.  The problem was, they didn’t read well, didn’t really say much, and weren’t adding much value.  Quality articles are now required if you want the articles to be used by other sites.  There are so many free articles out there that only the ones that are well constructed and well written are going to be used.  Copyblogger has a lot of great tips to help you get started and wordtracker can help you choose the high value keyword phrases that you need to optimize in your copy.  If you get this right you are ‘giving’ the reader value in terms of interesting and valuable content and as a result you will ‘receive’ lots of links to your site.

Linking strategy

Many of the free directories require a reciprocal link before agreeing a link to your site.  A clear example of give and receive, but a more interesting way of giving and receiving is through the trackback functionality on blogs.  If give and link to your blog and say something interesting (of value and a unique perspective), chances are you will notice and possibly, if I’m really lucky, link back to me.  That trackback will then link back to my blog post and (hopefully) bring some traffic to my blog .