I am going back to the very basics of SEO, as this is where some people fall down, making them unable to explore deeper into the discipline. To understand SEO, you have to understand that an SEO campaign has to have a strategy behind which page will focus on which search terms.

Confusion over this usually comes in two forms:

1. People think that the whole site, rather than one page, should be concentrated on three or four key phrases and go about populating every title etc. with similar copy concentrating on just three or four phrases.

2. People think that one page can concentrate on a large (or limitless) number of phrases.
Those in the former category need to be educated that focusing your whole site on three or four key phrases will not mean you have greater chances of appearing in the search engines – it is probably that only one page will probably feature in the top 100 (if at all). Therefore, there are lots of pages with wasted potential.

Those who fall in the latter category have missed out on a small but salient piece of information – page titles and meta tags can only be of a certain length before search engines start to see them as spam. For example, page titles should be about 70 characters in length.

Once you grasp these basics, you can see that each page intended to gain traffic from search engines should be concentrated on a small number of differing key phrases. You should then gain links to this page with anchor text including these phrases only.

For example the homepage could concentrate on a few competitive phrases aimed at a national audience, whilst local terms could each have their own page. This is a simple beginner strategy and from this starting point you can then start to think beyond – for example, the homepage should be concentrated upon for gaining outside links as it is concentrating on the most popular phrases, and should link to the most internal pages to spread about the benefit of these links to the rest of the site. Once you’ve got au fait with this strategic SEO mindset, you can also get a clearer picture of how to integrate SEO campaigns with PPC campaigns, or with your internet marketing strategy in general.

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Bing, Google, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Tools, Yahoo!