If you are new to search engine optimization and wondering what is the secret in getting top ranks in the search engines, the secret is link building. That’s not what I’m going to talk about today because I have talked enough in other search engine optimization tips in this blog.

What I’m going to talk about today is the “other secret”.

You see, with some keyword research and link building effort, it is not hard to raise the ranks in the search engines. The challenge is how to stay there. With millions of new webpages being added each day, and more and more marketers becoming SEO savvy, your competitors will beat your ranking sooner than you think.

The solution? More backlinks!

The truth is, link building is a never-ending chore and if you want to keep your position, you literally have to keep building links to your website for as long as the website exists. That can be a daunting task and many people give up.

So how can you overcome this problem?

One way is to outsource. This means you pay other people to do the daunting job. View outsourcing as a form of leverage. The degree of leverage varies dramatically, from engaging someone to write or spin articles to engaging a professional to do the entire process of link building. Treat link building as a necessary expense, just like the need to employ a person to man a brick-and-mortar store, so that you can free yourself from doing other things, such as developing more websites or networking.

Another way is to encourage your visitors to link to you. This is only possible when you have a website that truly provides good values and good solutions to a problem, so good that people are willing to quote your website in forums or in their blogs. In fact, this is the true backlinks that Google wants.

Both ways should be used concurrently.

Your Blueprint To SEO Success

If you were to build a website with intention to use search engine as its main traffic source, here is the blueprint I would advise.

1) Build a site that provides true values. Forget about those made-for-adsense websites. Fill the site with good articles and good online applications that people can use. They will be the ‘link baits’ that your visitors will bite and voluntarily spread your website. A good affiliate program can expedite the spreading process tremendously. If not, you’ll need to be a bit more patient.

2) Build backlinks. Either do it yourself or get someone competent to do it for you. This step is necessary until your website is rooted in the search engine and when more people link to your website voluntarily.

3) Add more webpages to your website with the intention to target more keywords. Note that each webpage should target at most 2-3 keyword phrases, usually only 1 keyword phrase. This means the more webpages you have, the more keywords you can target and hence the more traffic you can potentially receive.

4) Rinse and repeat step 2 and 3, with the intention to create more link baits. Remember, a link bait can either be a content or an online application. As more visitors come to your website and find it useful, it is inevitable that some will spread your webpages to others and that’s when more backlinks will be established on autopilot. That’s what you want to achieve eventually.

Many marketers missed Step 4 and they work very hard to do Step 2 and 3. Start your website on the right track and your SEO journey will become easier and easier. If not, you will become exhausted eventually, regardless of how hard you work initially.

In my next post, I will show you an example of what I mean by link bait. Stay tuned.