The techniques you will learn here are called "white hat" SEO, or safe optimization. In the past, many people who thought they had fooled the SE's ended up losing their page ranks and much of their traffic.
In one case, an Internet marketer had many niche sites and all used "black hat" techniques that were disallowed in a new update of Google's algorithm. This resulted in the loss of his entire $20,000 per month income within a day or two. You obviously would not want to put in all that effort and then lose your results because you did something Google did not like.
"...the strategies herein will focus on what makes Google choose your web page to be at the top of the results (and how to take advantage of the greatly increased traffic this can bring)."
As with many other activities related to selling things online, SEO starts with keywords. The same keyword research you do for article marketing and pay-per-click advertising applies to SEO as well. For details on keyword research, check the keywords module. If you have a brand new Web site, you will be penalized automatically by Google (this is called the Google sandbox), because the longer a site has been around (in good standing with Google), the more Google values it. The rationale is that only people who are serious about the Web will want to maintain a site for a number of years. One way to overcome this problem is to quickly establish some high quality links to your site. You will find notes on another way to overcome this problem at the bottom of this report under footnote (1).
The first thing you want to do is to find a major traffic keyword phrase for your long-term strategy and other long tail keywords for your start-up strategy. Try to get this major traffic keyword phrase in your domain name. If, for example, you can't get the domain name "identity theft" (not too likely), then try adding words to it until you get the name you want.
You can also add words such as "a," "the," "an," and "is." For example, you may be able to get "identitytheftis.com", which would not be a bad name. The reason you want the major keywords in the domain name is actually a bit complicated, and somewhat of an advanced concept. Generally, it is best to get a .com name rather than any other choice. If you want to know more, check out footnote (2) at the bottom of this page.
Another option is to find a more generic domain name that would work for almost any product or service (such as Yahoo, for example). You could also use your own name as your domain name, which is a way to brand yourself and not a bad idea if you intend to be online for a long time.
The first thing you want to do is to find a major traffic keyword phrase for your long-term strategy...
At any rate, lets assume you have found some less competitive long-tail keywords (LTK). Do a Google search on your keywords with quotes on each end, like this: "identity theft." Google will give you the exact match results, and your real competition. However, this means that many sites showing up in the competition section of the page (right side toward the top) have the exact same LTK that you have. Preferably, you want there to be fewer than 50,000 competing pages - in fact, the fewer the better - ideally, you should have fewer than 10,000. Here is an example of an average keyword search. Say you are looking for a doctor. If you type in the word "doctor," you may find all kinds of information, but probably will not get the names of local doctors (for this example, say, San Francisco area). A simple refinement, then, would be to type in "doctor san Francisco, ca." This would more than likely result in a list of doctors in San Francisco.
Here are the actual results for the term "doctors." There were many more results for this term (Results 1 - 10 of about 169,000,000 for doctors) than for "doctors san francisco ca" (Results 1 - 10 of about 934,000 for doctors san francisco ca). Still, these terms have far too much competition for you to compete effectively to get to the top of the search results. Therefore, if you were looking for keywords with these terms, you would need to look further for less competitive ones
