Is SEO Really A 3 Step Process?

The title of this article may startle some of you, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the complexities of SEO, and I realize why it scares so many people into hiring others to do it for them. Getting good SEO help can sometimes be a daunting task, and you never know just what you’re going to get for your hard earned money.

Just what exactly is there to a good, solid SEO campaign? Asking myself the same question last night, I laughed to myself as I realize that it’s simply not all that hard - even for someone brand new to running a website. I was honestly able to break down a simple SEO campaign into 3 steps, and I have them listed below for your thoughts.

Three Step SEO Process:

1. Write Good Content - Yeah, I’m sure some of you hate the fact that attaining good search engine rankings involves writing good content, and I fully admit that there is plenty of bad content out there that ranks well - but for the purpose of this article, I’m breaking it down into the most simple process I can think of. Writing good content serves many purposes, and a lot of it will relate to step 3. You see, as we move into 2008 and beyond, social media sites are becoming mainstream sources of traffic for many, many websites. Now, leveraging the power of social media sites involves a few steps on it’s own, but the main one is, yes, writing good content. If you don’t write something worth reading, then you’ve pretty much lost the battle right from the start. Providing your readers with insightful, helpful, humorous, or in-depth content will not only get them to your site, but it will also keep them coming back time and time again. The benefits of the previous sentence will make more sense in step 3. You really can’t go wrong with supplying the masses with good content, and it should be the starting point of ranking high for a particular keyword or keyphrase.

2. Actual Optimization - The definite second step in the 3 step SEO process is on page optimization. This is all the stuff you read about all over the web when you look up “SEO Help”. On page optimization includes picking an optimal title tag, meta description, meta keywords (if you care to), and analyzing your keyword density levels. Tidying up your page and it’s content is crucial in getting those big bad search engines to take notice, and can make the difference between a page 44 and a page 1 or 2 ranking. Again, it’s an important step (okay, if you’re being technical, this is many little steps compacted into one), but without step 3, it’s pretty much useless. So read on…

3. Link Building - The first step is the foundation, the second step is the technical side of things, and this ever so important third step is what puts you in the driver’s seat. Let’s say I’m building and trying to rank a page for “candle making”. First, I would provide great content, second, I would optimize the title, meta data, and keyword density, and third, I would do my best to attain high quality incoming links to that page with good anchor text. As you’ll read over and over again, getting good one way, incoming links to the particular page you’re trying to rank is arguably the most important part of the SEO process. The links serve three purposes on their own:

1. Allows you to get ranked.
2. Maintains ranking.
3. Boosts rank.

I made a few references to how step one is related to step three, and here is the correlation - when you write good content, and it gets people talking, the awesome effect of “natural linking” takes place, and that is something that will carry that particular article page to the top of the rankings. Depending on what you wrote, and how many people read it, it could mean the difference of hundreds, or possibly even thousands of natural, one-way incoming links. This phenomenon especially rings true with social media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reditt, and all of those relate sites.

As I may have pointed out in a previous post, I actually work for a company that offers SEO services, and I talk to customers all day who wonder why they aren’t ranking, or why their rankings have dropped over time. It always blows my mind that most of these types of questions result from their total lack of link building efforts. I’ll ask right away about their link building campaigns - and usually I’ll get a “huh?” or, “what do you mean, backlinks?”. I’ll admit, as much as I love SEO and helping people, I’m sometimes shocked by the absolute lack of knowledge out there. If I were to make a list of small businesses in even my small little rural town that have websites with poor SEO, and I could take them on as clients, I would be wealthy in a few weeks time. People that call and ask these questions are literally shocked when I tell them that link building is the final, yet, most important step in having a chance at ranking for their particular keywords. I guess they believe that if they complete everything in step 2, that they’re good to go. Unfortunately, that’s very far from the truth. After I get out of “education mode” when responding to these questions, the next thing they ask (every time) is, “how in the heck am I supposed to get backlinks?”. Luckily (and the main reason I wrote it is because of this question), I refer them to my popular “104 Ways To Get Backlinks” post. Honestly, if I really sat down and thought more about it, I could probably turn that “104 Ways” into several hundred. But I digress…

So, once you complete the above steps, and use it as your SEO campaign, it’s actually quite easy to rank a page for a specific keyword. I’ve used this three step process to rank tons of pages in the past, and I continue to use it to this day.

Yeah, it really can be that easy! This is more of a top level overview, but if you’ve read any of my previous posts, or done some research on your own, this easy three step process will make sense. So don’t get bogged down with all of the debated and complex SEO issues. Stick to what we know works, and just roll with it each time. You’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results