As I’ve written before, there are three main “tiers” that you need to master in order to succeed in your online business.

Well, okay, you don’t have to master them - you just have to reach a point where you don’t completely suck at them.

The three tiers are: 

*Technical stuff

*Writing

*Marketing

Most people excel at one or maybe two of the three tiers, but it’s rare that someone will be gifted at all three things.

When you’re just starting out with your first website or blog, it’s difficult to figure out how much time you should be devoting to each thing.

That’s when you should “cheat.” Why figure out everything yourself when there are so many excellent reports and tutorials out there?  

Dan Thies is an SEO (search engine optimization) expert who wrote a classic guide many years ago called SEO Fast Start.  Since then, he’s updated it. Everything in it remains timely and important, from the proper use of meta tags to how to do proper keyword research before entering a market.

You can download SEO Fast Start for free at Dan’s site: SeoFastStart.com.

And he also has an excellent Internet marketing blog there, so be sure to check it out.

Whether you’re new to SEO or if you think you know everything there is to know about SEO, you’ll definitely want to read through Dan’s report. I just finally downloaded my copy today after a friend recommended it to me, and I’m finding things in there that I didn’t know. It’s a great guide.

When I first got started with websites and blogs my SEO was non-existent. I’d just throw anything up on a page and hope that people found it. This included some classic pieces of award-winning journalism like articles about my cats’ latest escapades.

Roman and Becka looking innocent

I wrote about all kinds of stuff, giving zero thought to keywords. You could do this years ago because there were far fewer sites on the Net. Now the search engines have become picky about how they index things because there is an overload of information out there, and it’s the spiders’ job to parse through it all.

If you’re just getting started with websites, don’t be intimidated by SEO. It’s really just about showing the search engine spiders the keyword phrases you want them to see so they will think your page is highly relevant for those keywords. This will allow your articles to rise in the search engines. And don’t worry, you can create optimized pages without artifically stuffing lots of keywords or writing in a robotic way. You should never sacrifice readability for keyword density.

If you’re doing Wordpress blogs many of the same principles of SEO will apply, but you’ll want to use a plugin like the excellent All in One SEO Pack so you can enter your own keywords and optimize your blog posts.

That’s the one I use. All in One SEO Pack replaces an earlier plugin called Another Wordpress Meta Plugin which is similar but is only supported up to Wordpress version 2.1.2 at this point. And I think the newest Wordpress installations are on 2.1.3 at this point? I lose track. But basically Another Wordpress Meta Plugin probably won’t work with the newest versions of Wordpress that are coming out.

More importantly, All in One Seo Pack offers some extra features that Another Wordpress Meta Plugin lacks, so I recommend using All in One Seo Pack.

When if comes to learning SEO, just do a little reading and then jump in and start fiddling with your site’s meta tags and you’ll soon get the handle of it.

Even if you’re weak in the “tech” part of the three tiers of Internet marketing, you shouldn’t find SEO too difficult.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 9:03 pm and is filed under The Three Tiers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.