The answer: It takes work! I know, bummer right?!

Getting your website ranked in the search engines is a combination of art and science, skill and research. It’s really not difficult and depending on your niche, it might be easy. But you are going to have to work for it.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is made up of 3 basic ingredients:

• Keyword research
• Content
• Link building

You may or may not have heard the expression “Content is King.” This is a widely debated topic within the SEO community. What they are talking about is the content on your site is #1 above all else. The other side says that links are more important. Links are how many sites point to your site.

Bottom line is this, both are important! However, if you have no content on your site, I don’t care what anyone says, you’re not going to rank nearly as well or, maybe even more importantly, for as many keywords as if you did.

I’ve broken it down for you in detail with these three tutorials:

Keyword Research

Before you start writing your content, it’s a good idea to know what people are searching for. Remember how you search for your business and how others search for your business could be two completely different things.
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Content

Now that you know what people are searching for, it’s time to write content around those keywords. When you plan out your content, each page should be focused on one keyword – called keyword focused content pages.
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Link Building

The next component of SEO is link building. This is where you get as many websites to link to you as possible. Think of these links as “votes” of credibility.
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A really good quick way to do some simple keyword research is to use the Google Adwords Tool. This will give you a good representation of how people are searching for your product or service.

Here’s a search I did for “wilmington nc storage.” This shows you what keywords are being searched and how many searches are being made on Google.

Just that one main keyword has produced potentially a dozen keyword phrases (multiple keywords) that you can now write content on.

Think of keywords as fish hooks in the water. The more keywords your site is optimized for, the better chance of getting a bite.

Take a look for a moment at the Advertiser Competition column. This is based on how many people are bidding on those keywords within Google Adwords, which is where you pay for search engine traffic from Google. Learn more about that here.

This does sometimes translate into how competitive the keyword is in the organic (free) search results. The more competitive a keyword, the more work you’re going to have to do to rank for it.

For more advanced keyword research, check out Wordtracker. You can create massive keyword lists, know exactly how many sites are competing for your keywords, plus uncover even more keywords through their research tools.

• Article Marketing – where you write and publish articles to article directories.
• Directories – does your town have any websites that list local businesses? Also search for directories specifically for your niche; real estate, automotive, plumbing, storage, etc.
• Press Releases – most press release distributors will allow a link, sometimes with an extra fee, but it’s worth it.
• Association Sites – Does your Chamber of Commerce post the links of their members’ websites?
• Social Media – Facebook, Digg, Delicious are all great places your site should be although not all will count towards SEO.
• Link to Others – gets their attention and they may reciprocate.
• Make Contact – yep, good old fashion asking. Ask colleagues, associates, family and friends to put your site in their blogroll, please.
• Blog Comments – Comment on other blogs most allow you to post a link. Again, not all will count towards your SEO but some will and it will get the attention.
• Forum Posts – Along the same lines as blog comments but your link is included in the signature file of your posts.
• Guest Posts – See if you can do a guest article for blogs that would benefit from your information.
• Hub Sites – Create pages on sites like Squidoo, Hubsites.

There are many ways to try to do this but it is tough. Ask yourself, “Why would somebody link to my website?” Sometimes people will link to your site if you provide quality content or something of value.

The search engines look at links pointing to your website as a “vote” for your site. So the more votes you have, the more authority it must carry. Like any other SEO method, link building has been tried to be manipulated as well. Search engines are getting smarter all the time, so even if you think you’ve pulled one over on Google, don’t count on it to work for long.