Search Engine Optimization for your blog or website - SEO Secrets part I

OK, you've read (I hope) my entries on Blog Search Engine Optimization and implemented the techniques. But your Google ranking could still use a boost. Let's move on from basic SEO to the deepest, most secret core of SEO techniques that make the difference between an armchair optimizer and a pro.

Basic Search Engine Optimization could be compared to practicing Karate: you need to hone your basic techniques so that the fundamentals are always right, you optimize your blog or website almost without knowing it: The title tags, the XML sitemaps, internal links, robots.txt, meta tags and so on. From this you build up to the more advanced techniques.

But that's just the minimal requirements fulfilled right there. If you really want to stand out from the crowd, you need to go deeper. SEO is hard work, and in order to succeed, you need to look at the big picture.

In this series of entries I shall go over, one by one, the individual steps that you need to take in order to succeed in search engine optimizing your blog or website. What I will write here is universal; it's not limited to Wordpress in any way.

I shall use some of my own experimental sites as examples of successful SEO. Many of these websites are just experiments, and contain limited content. They are my SEO lab. For instance:

VLCD.info - informational minisite on Very Low Calorie Diets. Ranks number 2 out of 108,000 in Google for the search term "VLCD", second only to the Wikipedia entry.
DistanceLearningMBA.org - informational minisite on Distance Learning MBA programs. Ranks number 5 out of 773,000 in Google for the search term "Distance Learning MBA"

Also, as cases I shall present my main sites:
InnerBlogger.com - ranks number 1 out of 841,000 for "wordpress blogging guide" in Google
EstiBot.com - ranks number 2 out of 342,000 for "free domain appraisal" in Google.

So, then, to the secrets. I shall go over each of the following points in separate entries: