What is href="http://www.semresearch.com/2006/10/27/the-secret-to-seo/">t
he secret to SEO? Well, I'm going to tell you right now. All
you have to do is have great content that incorporates the
keywords search users will be using to find what you have to
offer, design your site in a way that can be easily crawled by
search engine spiders, and get relevant, inbound links pointing
to the pages on your site. That's it. Pretty simple, eh.

If it is so easy then why is there a whole industry built around
it? It's because knowing SEO and actually doing it are two
different things. SEO is actually a bit more complicated than I
made it out to be in the opening paragraph, you do need to know
some of the details of what search engines look for, but it
really isn't that hard to learn. You could just read Aaron
Wall's SEO books and read
up on some good SEO blogs such as such as href="http://www.seomoz">SEOmoz and be an expert in no time.
However, as I have already stated SEO is more than just know how.

A big part of SEO is getting relevant inbound links to the pages
on your site. This can be accomplished in many ways. Andy Hagans
and Aaron Wall have put together a pretty comprehensive list of
link building ideas href="http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml">here.
However, to be a really effective SEO you are going to have to
be little creative and have some marketing and business skills.
You need to be able to come up link building ideas and implement
them in a cost effective manner. It is pretty easy to get a lot
of traffic from the search engines with some know how and a
little effort, however, It is the SEO that can leverage their
resources in creative ways to get the most out of their money
and efforts that are most successful. Effective SEO really just
comes down to effective marketing, creating buzz about you site
and getting people to link to you naturally. If you want to be
an effective SEO learn as much as you can about marketing, then
supplement that knowledge with some basic information on how the
search engines work.

About the author:
Chris Sandberg is
president of SEM Research, a search engine and href="http://www.semresearch.com">social media marketing
company. To learn more about SEO visit the SEM Research blog
at SemResearch.com.