SEO is hard work. It takes much effort to optimize just the right elements of your web site so search engines will not only find you, but will also index your site so that it appears high in search query results. And all of that effort must be attended to by you. There are currently no tools that will put all of the elements of SEO in place for you.

Instead, you have to build your web site with SEO in mind, choose all the right keywords, and use them in the right places and balance on your site, determine if pay-per-click and paid inclusion programs are for you, use the right meta tags in the right places, create great content, and add all the right links.
Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

It is. But don’t let the amount of work overwhelm you. Consistent effort and the strategies included in this part of the book will have
you working toward your SEO goals in no time. Each of the chapters in this section contains an explanation of how these elements affect SEO, and how you can create and implement strategies to help you leverage that element to reach your SEO goals.

Building Your Site for SEO

Search engine optimization is a collection of strategies that improve the level at which your web site is ranked in the results returned when a user searches for a key word or phrase.

By now, that’s a definition you should be pretty familiar with. What you probably don’t know (yet) is how to achieve SEO. You can’t do it all at once. Instead,
SEO has to happen in stages. If you try to implement too many strategies at one time, two things are going to happen.
First, you won’t be able to tell which of your efforts are successful. Implementing one strategy at a time makes it possible for you to pinpoint which
strategies are working and which are not.

Second, when you try to implement too many strategies at one time, your efforts  even the successful ones  could be lost in the shuffle. It’s like having too many children running around the house on the weekend. If you’re not paying complete attention to all of them (and that’s virtually impossible), at least one is bound to get into something.

SEO is most successful when you concentrate on one effort at a time. A great place to start concentrating is on the way your site is built. One of the first things that attracts a search engine crawler is the actual design of your site. Tags, links, navigational structure, and content are just a few of the elements that catch crawlers’ attention.