The 2 most powerful aspects of search engine marketing are

* users type what they want to find into search boxes, making search engines the most precisely targeted marketing medium in the history of the world
* once you gain traction in the search results the incremental costs of gaining additional exposure are negligible when compared with the potential rewards, allowing individuals and small businesses to compete with (and perhaps eventually become) large corporations

While many people consider SEO to be complicated, I believe that SEO is nothing but an extension of traditional marketing. Search engine optimization consists of 9 main steps

1. market research
2. keyword research
3. on page optimization
4. site structure
5. link building
6. brand building
7. viral marketing
8. adjusting
9. staying up to date

Market Research

Do you have what it takes to compete in a market?

The first step is to search the major search engines to see what types of websites are ranking for words which you deem to be important. For example, if mostly colleges, media, and government institutions are ranking for your most important terms it may be difficult to rank for those types of queries. If, on the other hand, the market is dominated by fairly average websites which are not strongly established brands it may be a market worth persuing.

You can extend out the research you get from the search results by using the SEO for Firefox extension with the Firefox browser. This places many marketing data points right in the search results, and thus lets you see things like

* site age
* Google PageRank
* inbound link count
* if any governmental or educational sites link at their site
* if they are listed in major directories
* if bloggers link at their sites