Many of us consider ourselves to be somewhat efficient with search engine optimization. We tend to come on the Internet with the opinion that we need to be the jack of all trades as far as our Internet businesses concerned. For most of us, this is done out of necessity because we are not able to afford somebody to do the job for us at first. For others, it is the thrill of the challenge and watching our websites move up through the rankings in the search engines gives us a real boost. If you like to take care of these things yourself, here is an SEO checklist so that you don't miss any part of the process.

Choose Your Keywords - This is the first step in the SEO checklist and one that should never be skipped. In order for us to get targeted traffic to our website, we need to target keywords and keyword phrases that are actually being searched for on the search engines. There are plenty of tools that will help us to do this and they really take the guesswork out of the process.

Check the Competition - At its most basic level, we would need to make sure that it was not too much competition for this keyword phrase in Google. The easiest way for us to do this is by searching on Google for the keyword phrase inside of quotes. There are some programs out there that automate this process and can do so for hundreds of different keyword phrases. Just knowing that there is a little bit of competition is enough for some people but others want to know how well the top listings are positioned. This will give you an idea as to whether you will be able to overtake them or not.

Build the Page - Make your page according to the keyword phrase that you are using and include it in the title, toward the top of the page and naturally throughout the page. Don't worry too much about the keyword percentage, just make sure that you are using it wherever it fits into the content.

Get Some Links - You should not only be trying to get links to your main page, you should be trying to get links to every webpage on your site that you possibly can. Having links coming in to internal pages can greatly boost their rankings in the search engine and send you an unbelievable amount of traffic.

Don't Stop - If you build a webpage and get a few links coming into it, you may get a handful of visitors to it every day. Don't ever stop building new webpages because that is what is going to make you successful in the long run. Once you find something that is working as far as search engine optimization is concerned, make sure that you duplicate it with as many pages as possible. Only then will you understand exactly how powerful going through a SEO checklist can be.