Now it’s time to look at link building, which as much as anything will determine where your pages rank for different queries.

We’ll also take a look at analytics so you can understand how your SEO efforts have been working and gain insights into how to improve them. Unless you’re measuring results you’re basically throwing things into the wind and hoping they land where you want. Analytics will let us know which way the wind is blowing and point us to jet streams to so our SEO lands where we want.

As a quick reminder it’s best to think of SEO as part of your marketing. Sometimes it will make sense to do something that doesn’t help your SEO efforts and perhaps even hurts them a bit, because it helps your overall marketing. You don’t want to get lost in the details.

Also keep in mind that the keywords you target set the stage for everything else. Pages don’t just rank. They rank for specific queries or keyword phrases. Your choice in keywords should be focused on what ultimately provides the most benefit for your business. Targeting a word like “free” may bring lots of traffic, but that traffic won’t be looking to spend any money.

Search engine optimization is a complex subject , especially when you consider all the information and misinformation readily available online. Unfortunately it’s often hard to tell which is which. Does the latest tactic you’re reading about work? Does it work for all sites? Only some sites? Or is just another crackpot theory that sounds reasonable, but will never help to improve search traffic to your site? Let’s face it SEO can become very confusing. The good news is it doesn’t have to be. The basics of SEO are actually quite easy to understand and if you give yourself a good foundation in learning search engine optimization you’ll be able to sort fact from fiction much more easily and you’ll have the tools to delve into more advanced SEO...