Today's post is by guest blogger, Olga Ionel.

SEO is a term that virtually everyone has heard. In simple terms, SEO is the utilization of specific techniques to optimize a website in order to gain and maintain maximum visibility and ranking. This concept is useful for anyone who wants to develop a wide readership for their site, but is particularly beneficial for companies that are seeking to promote their products and services through Internet marketing.

Whether you want to utilize SEO to bring attention to your company’s website or for the purpose of driving traffic to your affiliate marketing blog, an effective strategy is important to developing an SEO campaign that will help you to achieve your professional goals.

What is an SEO Strategy?

Planning is an essential aspect of running any business. It is next to impossible to handle the various responsibilities and obligations of a company without properly planning these activities and how they will be fulfilled. When it comes to SEO your company’s strategy will be focused on the various SEO activities that you would like to utilize, and how each of these will be implemented.

Search Engine Optimization is not just one activity, nor does it require only one form of application. It is important that you determine which SEO techniques would be most appropriate for your particular internet presence and the most powerful way that you can use these techniques in conjunction with your promotional strategies.

There are three core aspects of any SEO campaign. Your strategy for developing your campaign should be balanced among these aspects, with attention given to optimizing the techniques to your niche and your audience.

1. Website Design

   The appearance of your site is the foundation on which you will build the rest of your strategy. Internet spiders, the software that explores the World Wide Web in order to build an index of the words that are used on individual web pages, cannot detect things such as images, videos, or Flash media, so the way that your site looks will make little impact on the results of the crawl. The look will, however, make a tremendous impact on the impression that your site makes on your visitors.

   Once a visitor has found your site it is important that they are compelled to stay on it. Your design choices can greatly influence the traffic that your receive and maintain. One way to optimize this design is by using WordPress themes. These make developing an attractive, well-organized site simple and user-friendly.

2. Keyword Placement

   Your primary SEO strategy will begin with keyword placement. The spiders will crawl your site in order to gather the words that you use, as well as information on how you use them. These keywords will be the frequently-used search terms as are related to your niche, and should be strategically integrated into your content in order to be picked up by the spiders, but also appreciated by human readers.

   Creating valuable content is essential to the success of your site, regardless of the main goal of the site, and must read naturally and comfortable, not as if the keywords were forced into the text. The most effective SEO strategies involve creating distinct, unique pages for each primary keyword that you wish to highlight on your site. This content will be what draws in the traffic and encourages the readers to stay and explore your site further.

3. Link Optimization

   The second aspect of your SEO strategy will be using links to direct greater volumes of traffic to your site. The spiders will also be able to find these links and follow them to each of your pages, as well as to other related sites, thereby increasing the validity and visibility of your site so that it can be ranked higher in the results. It is crucial that you choose SEO linkbuilding tactics that are ethical, rather than linking to unrelated sites or spamming your links throughout the Internet with no real purpose.

Participation in blogs, forums, and other interactive online communities is an effective way of building valuable links to enhance your SEO campaign.