1. Use a domain name that represents the keyword you want to rank highly for, but avoid looking spammy. The best domain names are short, contain the most relevant keywords, are memorable, and easy to spell. Bing especially places a lot of emphasis on sites that have keywords in the domain name.

2. Invest in unique and quality content. Too many affiliates try to optimize a website that uses low-quality content pasted directly from a private label article, offers landing page, etc. Unique content is a sign of quality, and well-written content is much more likely to generate links spontaneously… which means it’s much easier to optimize a website with good content.

3. Create new relevant content for your site on a regular basis (preferably every day). Adding fresh content to your blog site daily, weekly, or monthly will greatly increase the size and reach of your website over time, ensure search engine bots return to your site regularly, and build an audience.

4. Forget cheap automated link building tools In order for your website to rank higher in the search engine results page (serp) faster and longer, then you need to build good quality backlinks. Quality far outweighs quantity any day and while it will take time to build these high-quality backlinks initially, your website will benefit more in the long run.

5. Follow these standard site optimization guidelines:

Make sure that the HTML title tag of each page uses 2-3 keywords, is no longer than 65 characters, and does not contain stop words, such as “and, of, is” etc.

Use HTML heading tags (H1, H2, H3), short paragraphs, and lists (UL or OL) to make your written content easy for readers to scan, and be sure to use keywords in these elements (just don’t fill words key where they don’t belong).

In the main content of your page, links are the most powerful links on a page – footer and sidebar links are fairly low in value. Therefore, some of your most powerful sitelinks come from in-text links in articles or blogs on your website.

Use keywords in the file name or URL of each page, each image file name, etc.

When adding an image to a page, be sure to use an alt tag that contains appropriate keywords relevant to the surrounding content.

Link images to pages: The “anchor text” of an image link is the text that you place in the alt tag.

Don’t put important content in IFRAMES, JavaScript tags, or as text inside an image.

Do not use JavaScript or CSS tricks to try to “hide” user text in order to fool search engines; this is a great way for Google or Bing to penalize your site. This does not include hiding the occasional H2 or H3 tag.

-When naming files, avoid using underscores, capital letters, or spaces; these characters can lead to broken links and/or tracking issues. Instead, use a hyphen to separate keywords in file names (just-like-this.html).

6. Promote your website, as if you were trying to promote yourself. Create profiles on social networking sites and make friends with other people who are also interested in your own niche and take the time to keep their profiles active. Participate in related forums. to your niche, offering good unbiased advice. Invest some time to create videos and upload them to your own channels on the video sharing website. Although YouTube is the largest and most popular, there are many other video sharing websites on the internet that will help boost your branding campaign. Pay for a quality press release submission service instead of using some spammy ridden free service. These tasks are time consuming and somewhat expensive, but that is why they work.

7. Focus your SEO efforts on creating great content, and then promote that content one link at a time. Use a little creativity to create a guide, resource, online tool, etc., that your niche might find really useful. Then, once that content is created, focus on promoting it by contacting bloggers, other site owners, etc., and asking them to review your content. If the quality is high and the content is useful, you will get links.

8. Website speed is important. Increasing site speed is a great way to boost search engine traffic to an existing site. Most sites can experience dramatic speed improvements by using browser caching, gzip compression, archiving entity, and expiration tags. There are also some cheap content delivery network (CDN) options available from Amazon and Rackspace that can drastically reduce site load time… especially if you rely on cheap shared hosting for your website.

Finally, when you think of SEO, think of the tortoise and the hare! While quick tricks may seem like the easiest option to get the search engine results you want, the reality is that slow and steady efforts will win the race. If you want your website to rank first overall for your niche term, you need to find a site that is better than all the rest. Quality counts.