So you think you can do SEO? Do you know the basics of search engine optimization? There are a lot of myths and misconceptions around SEO and it really is tough for anyone to start working on SEO. I know for sure that there’s a lot of those myths that really leave you working long hours for nothing, and in many cases make you appear like a spammer.
There are just a few essential things you need to know to get started – you have to test everything else for yourself, because not only most things you hear about SEO are false, many things that are true now can be wrong in the future, and vice versa.
The first thing you need to grasp is the competition. And it’s very easy to check it. Just type in your keyword in Google in quotes and you get a rough number of pages you have to compete with. However, it’s just a rough estimation and it can be very off. The more important thing is the first page of results itself.
To analyze it easier, you will need to use Firefox and the SEO plug-in (or any alternative). The ages of domains, the PageRanks and the number of links that the result entries have are the most important factors that indicate what you will have to do in order to rank.
The next thing to understand is that in order to rank, you will have to take someone’s place. So examine every single result closely and choose one that looks the weakest. First thing to do is to make a better page than the one you want to beat – that means more quality content, most of the time.
The next thing, and it’s huge, is the backlinks with your keyword for the anchor text. Here, you must also analyze the competition and the measures you will have to take. As the rule of thumb, a few quality backlinks will win over a ton of spammy links.
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