Ranking highly in search engines has nothing to do with SEO

SEO is a lot like weight loss...people always look for the shortcut, when there is a surefire way to do it. People think they can lose weight with a magic pill, craze diet, or amazing exercise machine, when the surefire way is to eat less and exercise more.

With SEO, there's no magical formula for structuring your page or writing meta tags...the best way to rank highly is to have lots of unique, useful content and have people link to you. Any site with thousands of pages of unique content and lots of links ranks highly for the terms on those pages.

Google "digital camera reviews" and you'll see a site I worked on, Steve's Digicams, comes up 4th because there are 20,000 pages of digital camera reviews spanning 12 years that hundreds of people have linked to because the information is useful.

This is not to say that you can't game the system a little. One way is with niche content. The less competition there is for a keyword, the easier it is to move to the top of the rankings with fewer links. Look at http://www.wisegeek.com/ as an example. They find terms that have high search traffic, but few results. Then they pay writers to create content targeting those terms. They still have unique content, but they require fewer links in to vote them to the top of the results.

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