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Keyword research, landing page or body copy optimization and link building are the most important basic principles of SEO. When search engines rank pages they look at the semantic relationship between words and their relevance to the theme of the
site or page. The aforementioned three factors help to build that relationship to facilitate ranking. I will address each in their order of importance to the overall optimization process. Please be aware that this is a complex subject on which books have been written. I will summarize the key points in this article.

1. Keyword Research

Before you can employ the last two principles you need to correctly identify through research a primary keyword for each landing page you are optimizing. It makes no sense to rank well for a keyword or term that no one is actually searching for.

There are essentially two phases of keyword research which are discovery and evaluation. You must first start with the discovery phase which consists of conducting a brainstorming session to establish a seed list of keywords for later
refinement in the evaluation phase. The goal is to have a complete set of nouns and then break out the adjectives. We are looking for multi-word phrases that contain qualities, characteristics, or attributes. During the session the following questions should be posed:

1. What do your customers need ? What problems are they trying to solve? What words do they use to describe their needs and problems?

2. What content do you have on your site that would satisfy someone's search?

3. How would you describe your product or service to a novice?

4. What words do industry magazines and industry analysts use to describe your products? Is there a category name that they use?

During the evaluation phase you will analyze your seed list with keyword research tools to come up with synonyms and related words which may be pertinent to your site or webpage theme. After the new list of words is determined you will then
proceed to analyze them based on their relevance, specificity and popularity. Your ultimate goal is to come up with keyword terms that are related to your topic, are fairly specific to attract qualified visitors and generate a good amount of search
volume.

2. Landing page / body copy optimization.

Once you have determined your primary keyword for your page it will then have to be implemented correctly in your copy. Body copy is a very important part of the search engine ranking algorithm. Spread the keywords throughout the page.

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