Just read on any webmaster or SEO forum and you’ll hear all kinds of rules for search engine optimization. Some are pretty on target while others are just plain nuts.

I just read a post on increase search engine traffic. It simplifies search engine optimization into three steps. Does that sound easy enough?

The steps sound pretty easy, but they do each take time and some creativity. The first step, for example, is keyword research. Thinking up all the basic keywords that you would like to focus on and seeing what you can discover beyond them can be pretty tough.

Creating a page for each important phrase is tough too. You need to figure out not only how to make each page unique and useful, you need to make it reasonable to have the page linked to the rest on your site. This means you have to balance the number of key phrases targeted with driving people nuts with too similar pages… or find a way to make them give just the right information that it all just flows beautifully.

The third and final step is the one that can be sheer torture… getting quality backlinks. This can be done through forums, blog comments, article marketing directory submissions and any other technique you can think of. The ideal listed in this post is to get others to link to you naturally, but that is for many the most difficult way.

While this article does cover the basics well, I don’t want any reader here to mistake the few steps for simplicity. Search engine optimization can be hard work. Expect it to take time.