Welcome to this quick hub on the basics of Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it has come to be abbreviated!

To be honest there is a lot of smoke and mirrors surrounding this topic! You can buy books that contain thousands of pages and that go into the subject in great depth.

However, it;'s a bit like a curve of diminishing returns in that if you get the basics right, each incremental optimization you carry out brings less and less benefit. Sad but true.

So, here is my guide to the basics of Search Engine Optimization, get these startegies in place and right and you needn't do much more.

Before I dive in, let me just say that you can buy instant traffic with PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing. However, you really MUST have a long term traffic strategy and a major part of that in Search Engine Optimization. PPC traffic is instant, but it that's it, it come and goes. Getting your SEO right ensures a steady flow of traffic long term and that's why it is such an important strand to your online startegy

O.K, let's get going. Once you have identified the keywords and keyword phrases you want to opitimize around you now need to build content pages around those keywords and optimize them so that the Search Engines index and rank them highly. Remember - Content is KING, it's what the Internet is here for!

Now, SEO has many people confused and tearing their hair out. I'm here to tell you now, it is NOT as difficult as you think...Once you know how it's done! You can literally have a page "SEO'd" in a under five minutes - don't believe me, well...read on!

Here is a very quick checklist for optimizing you content pages. Your Title Tag should include the buying keyword

Your Headline Tags (H1, H2, H3) must include the buying keyword. (Always have at least ONE Headline tag)

Any Images you use should have "alt tags" with buying keyword included.

The opening paragraph of each page must include your buying keyword.

You should aim for at least 500 words on each page.

There should be a buying keyword density of around 5% (that's 5 times in every hundred words or 25 times in a 500 word article :>) )

Your buying keyword should a mix of bold, italic and underlined throughout page. As I said at the beginning, this is by no means a definitive guide to SEO. However, it is more than enough for your content websites and will allow you, over time, to get decent levels of traffic from the Search Engines (for free!)

Final word, the more you optimize your content pages / sites, the more you'll receive of the following:

1. Free search engine traffic.
2. Better Adwords Quality Score -
3. Lower CPC -
4. Higher Ad Position -
5. Better CTR

So, to finish off, say you have researched 5 buying keywords for your niche. You would then create five separate pages each of which focuses on one of the keywords.

You would optimize each page as I described above.

Having completed those simple tasks, in time, traffic will start to flow from the search engines! If you do this correctly, over time, you will begin to see more and more traffic from search engines than you do from your PPC efforts!

So, you'll will be getting at least double or more traffic without spending a penny more!

So make sure you pay attention to SEO at this most basic level. There are many products that go into SEO in far more depth, but for the purposes or online marketing, this is more than sufficient to get the traffic flowing.

I hope you find this hub useful!