My take on search engine optimization is if you create a web site that offers original, useful content, and do your part to get the word out about it, then the visitors and high rankings will soon come. Rather than spending your time and money trying to figuring out a complex SEO strategy, use your resources to make your site useful to your visitors. For example, instead of just selling a product or service on your site, offer product reviews and comparisons or post a weekly newsletter with content that will interest your customers.

Getting a high ranking on search engines is not something that can be done automatically by a software program or by joining a link exchange. In fact, these methods may actually lower your site's ranking. Don't try to outsmart the search engines; learn how to work with them.

Offer quality, original content on your site and work on building relationships with other site owners that have similar content to yours. Once you've established these relationships, post a link on your site to their site and ask them for a reciprocal link. Building your site's link popularity is one of the most effective ways to increase your site's ranking. Even if your customers don't actually find your site through these links, the search engines will consider your site more relevant by having these incoming links and will therefore place your site higher in their search results.

Follow the steps below for a simple SEO strategy:

• Place descriptive keyword-rich titles and headings on every page of your site. Enclose your headings in <h1>, <h2> or <b> tags.
• Hire a professional web content writing service (like FreelanceWriters.us) to write SEO-friendly content for your web site (or do it yourself following the guidelines in this article).
• Submit your site to the Open Directory Project (Google uses their database for it's own directory), the major search engines and any other directories that are relevant to your site. When submitting to Google, be sure to also create and submit a Google sitemap.
• Get high quality inbound links from other sites (follow the guidelines in this article).
• Add original and useful content to your site on a regular basis (at least once a month).
• Get active in online forums and include links in your posts to pages on your site that offer more information on the topic. (Be careful not to make your post sound like an advertisement or you may get banned from the forum.)
• Submit your site to the Webby Awards and other web site awards programs.