Leading the search engine listings are the sites with:
1. Good Content
2. Links to your site
3. Relevant Title tags and Meta tags on your pages

It does sound easy, but is so often forgotten.

‘Good Content’

So what do this SEO people mean when they say ‘Good Content’?!

Good content is the content that is good for the visitor and the search engine. It has to be informative for people to read it, and it needs to contain keywords for the search engines to understand what it is about. Majority of the people write this way anyway. It is hard to write about search engine optimization for example without mentioning the phrase search engine optimisation in the text, isn’t it? The search engines of today are even smart enough to ‘understand’ your abbreviations in the text so one could argue that one can use the SEO instead of the full name. Unfortunately even that the search engine understands the abbreviations for the keyword ranking those are not included. Use SEO to tank for SE, but write a full search phrase: search engine optimization if you want to rank high for it.

The good content has to be unique – you cannot take the text from a page that the search engines has in their indexes already. The content duplication issues arise and those are best to be avoided. So write the original content, your content.

Relevancy is another aspect of the quality of the content that the search engines love. If your whole site is about SEO, and you have one page about Siamese cats, that poor page will never rank really high for the term it is relevant for – the Siamese cats.

You blog, about interesting topics (link bait). Then you put comments on related and relevant blogs with a link to your blog / articles. You submit your RSS feed to wherever you see fit, and you submit your blog to the blog search engines.

Outsourcing Blogging or not - you need a blogger who understands your (target) market and your niche. A local blogger will write in a local language, about local topics. That is far easier to read (especially in a blog) than a PR structured articles released by the professional PR agencies.

Blogging Costs - an hour or two a day to start with. That will give you a meaningful (measurable) results in a month or two. You need to decide what your targeted SEO result is. In a number of relevant visitors per day. Relevant meaning, that come from the search engines for the phrases you want them to come (relevant to your business). Scope depends of the size of the market. Google.ie is much smaller than Google.co.uk, that is much smaller than Google.com. Therefore it is most likely (depending on the industry or niche), that you will achieve much more in a smaller market with the same budget.