When talking to people that really don’t know much about SEO I found it hard to explain how it works until I came up with my little SEO game. Basically what I do now when explaining it to friends or possible clients is to think of it as a game. When selecting your keyword or phrase, depending on how much competition there is for that keyword you assign it a value.

So for example “Web Hosting” would be 10,000 points, while “Best Web hosting in New Jersey” would be 450 points.

The points represent how many points you need to obtain a page 1 ranking in Google. Note these are just arbitrary numbers and don’t really mean anything.

Now, there are many SEO techniques you can use to obtain your page 1 ranking. Heres a simplified list.

1) On-Site SEO - 500 points
2) Off Site SEO - 5 - 1000 points

#1 basically consists of the work you do on your site. Good page titles, SEO friendly URLs, domain name, keyword density, inhouse links, H tags and meta tags.

So if you perfectly SEO your site, you get 500 points. Now when going after keywords/phrases that don’t have much competition, doing this might be enough to get a page 1 ranking. In the example above you can see the “Best web hosting in New Jersey” only takes 450 points to get a page 1 result.

However going after a more competitive keyword/phrase like Web Hosting takes many more points.

#2 basically consist of all the sites ranging from PR0 - PR9 that link to your site. So for instance if a site that is PR4 links to your site using your keywords you might get 15 points. If they link to your site without your keywords you might only get 10 points. Getting a PR8 site to link to yours with your keywords might give you 500 points. So you can see that getting high PR sites are worth it.

In our example above, “Web Hosting” is a very highly competitive keyword, so even with perfect SEO, your going to need a lot of sites with good PR to link to you before you get a page 1 ranking. So as you can see its sorta like a game where you try to get as many points as you can and the more points you get the close to page 1 you get.

Again, these numbers are not based off anything and are completely arbitrary. Its just a easy way that I’ve been using to explain how SEO works.