Many people are put off by search engine optimization due lack of knowledge about the process and the effort that it entails to achieve a good ranking. However, if you understand the process and are aware of some of the best tools that make it considerably easier, a good search engine ranking is readily achievable even for the most inexperienced publishers. If you follow proven methods the results are predicatable and you will get huge amounts of free traffic to your site.

Keyword research is the first, critical step to any successful SEO project. If you get it wrong then you could end up trying to rank well for a very competitive keyword and all your efforts will be going to waste. There are some great free tools for doing this like the Google Keywords tool. However, all the free methods have one significant limitation – they don’t evaluate the SEO efforts of the other competing sites and therefore establish how possible it is to compete in the rankings for that keyword.

For my keyword research I use just one tool called MicroNicheFinder. It pulls a lot of data from Google. However, what makes it so helpful is that it weighs up numerous factors including both the number of competing sites and the SEO of competing sites. Keywords that you stand an excellent opportunity of competing for are highlighted in green. It’s beautifully simple yet so incredibly effective.

The other critical aspect for ranking well in the search engines is new, regular, keyword rich, unique content. Blogging is great for this and the search engines love them. It’s particularly important to regularly update the content of a site at the start of its life to catch the attention of the search engines.

Back links are also vital to a good ranking and the search engines are looking for a consistent increases with time. Article marketing is great for this and you can create anchor links in your resource box using your target keywords. The huge downside to article marketing is that (if done manually) you’re looking at weeks and weeks of work to create multiple versions and submit to different sites. However, I use a great, paid tool called Unique Article Wizard which make the process about a thousands times easier. Not only does it create unique versions of your article, it also submits the article on your behalf. Using this tool you can literally generate thousands of back links with very little effort at all. Based on my own experiences this is remarkably effective.

Now, the above covers getting high numbers of back links. However, the resulting back links are not always on high page rank sites. As the search engines also place a lot of importance on the quality of your back links this is also another important consideration if you want to rank well. To do this I use another paid tool called EasyBacklinker which is (as far as I know) the only way of easily finding high page rank sites which you can add a do follow (this is very important) back link. I’m affraid that I don’t know of any free way of hunting down these sites so would recommend it if you can afford it (it’s not too expensive).

Based on my experiences this is all that you need to do to get a high ranking for a given keyword. Sure, it takes time. But it’s really worth it. Generally speaking a lot of people can’t be bothered with thorough SEO because it’s requires some effort. However, if you’re prepared to put in the time then you will rank well and get boat loads of free traffic.

Search engine optimization does however take time and you shouldn’t rush it as your site could end up getting sandboxed. For free immediate traffic I tend to publish articles on EzineArticles, Hubpages and Squidoo. These send trickles of traffic until my SEO starts to kick in.