Those of you who know me well probably are aware that I enjoy chess. It is a game of strategy, it is a game where you must think for yourself and also speculate what your opponent will do and how the game will end. Some people have this idea that chess is a gift, that those who are good at it were either born that way or had a champion mentor. This is not always the case, in fact many of these people were ordinary people, who put their all into the game and studied it day and night, strategized and calculated each move and that is why they won. So why am I comparing Chess to Seo? What does a board game have to do with seo anyways?

Because essentially the same strategy works for both games… in fact the main reason why webmasters never attain success is because they don’t have a strategy… and the ones that do often have a faulty concept of it. Most webmasters do not even calculate their own steps let alone anticipate those of their competitors. So how do they expect to win? They jump into the game much the same as a amateur Chess-player does, playing moves on a whim without realizing or contemplating the final outcome of that decision or calculating the risks and benefits to such a move. And THAT is the reason why in both games we have so many losers, its not because they don’t know the game, the rules of the game or the general ideas. Its because they don’t have a strategy and they aren’t planning ahead, there focus is on NOW and they don’t see the big picture.

So how does this analogy and realization help us become better seo? Well first once we realize an error we must take steps, careful steps to fix that error. If we lack a strategy and have been running our seo campaigns half-hazardously without thinking about the consequences, if that is the case then the logical solution is to create a fool-proof strategy. But how does one start a strategy? Using the following guide…

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