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Once you realise that to be successful on the web one must have a good concept of internet marketing strategies. Having spent a few dollars on pay per click advertising and have no or low conversion on your key phrases, it is only natural to turn to less costly means of internet advertising such as organic (natural) search engine optimization.

To be brief SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of techniques aimed at improving of a website ranking in search engine results.

Before you begin please understand that SEO is as complex and involving as another trade (electrician, doctor, lawyer, and etc.) but provided that you are dedicated and can spare an hour a day, one with no other guidance but internet itself should be able to reach its preset goals (first page in Yahoo, MSN, and Google) within a year for medium to low competitive keywords.
A good starting point is setting your long term goals. Pick your brain for key phrases that you think people would type into search engines to find you. Write them out and check how popular your keywords are. (How many searches were done in a search engine for each keyword in a period of time?) Use Overture – Yahoo tool providing monthly statistics for exact and relevant key phrases. Try to narrow down your keywords by making sure that they are specific to the content of your website, also contain at least 2 or 3 words, and generate at least over 500 searches per month. Have no more then 30.

The next step is aimed to trim your list to the primary 5-10 keywords. One must understand that a keyword difficulty is going to be your next criteria, as not all phrases are ranked equally. The best tool is seomoz, it does require registration but well worth it. You can also try seo consulting for quick, less accurate results. Once you run all of you key phrases, select the ones with ranking under 60%. (Preferably for beginners no higher then low 50% s range) Congratulations your goals are set!

If you stumble at any point address your questions in SEO forums. We recommend using seochat where your questions will be addressed promptly and in a friendly manner by SEO professionals.

In the next articles we will be covering domain names, hosting, search engine friendly web design, building content, submitting to directories and search engines, link popularity, tracking your progress, and specifics of search engines.