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Services : SEO 23 February 2012
 Search Engine Optimization

SEO strategy

What is SEO?

SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimisation".
Here we will deal with the task of optimising your web-site to improve its Search Engine ranking. Important words and terms are shown below in Proper Case.

Do you need SEO at all?

Strictly, you may not need any SEO. If you are certain that you have (and will continue to have) enough traffic and therefore enough sales you might think that you don’t have to bother with SEO.
However it would make sense to know why you have enough traffic so that you don’t accidentally upset this happy situation.

It is well known that Search Engines highly rank web-sites that are "successful". This success is measured by several factors, some of which are dealt with later on but the key here is "relevant content".

Content is king! It’s a bit of a cliché but if you have interesting content then other sites will eventually find you and link to you and the traffic will flow. If during that content creating process you have managed to structure your content so that it is Search-Engine-friendly and those people creating the inbound links pick up on Key-Words in your content then even better.

If you have a good flow of traffic to your web-site, without consciously carrying out any SEO, then what you have managed to do is replicate some of the processes that are outlined below.

It is highly likely that you will be able to improve your ranking and therefore your traffic and ultimately your sales but if you are happy where you are then you need read no further. However a lot of SEO thinking and planning actually relates to more traditional marketing so if you need marketing then you probably also need SEO.

SEO can be split into two main areas, known as On-Page and Off-Page.
On-Page work involves changes to the text and structure of your web-site.
Off-Page work is anything you can do that does not involve any modifications (with a few exceptions e.g. reciprocal links) to your web-site. For example: establishing good inbound links from other web-sites.

The ultimate goal is to get more visitors. However, there is no point in just gaining more visitors if those visitors don’t benefit you, so that needs to be kept in mind as you go through the various steps of optimisation.

Most major Search Engines have two types of listings:
Paid - Sometimes shown as "sponsored links". These are referred to as "Inorganic".
Free - Referred to as "Organic".

We will mainly be dealing with improving your Organic/Free listings.

The topics are split into:

  1. Research
  2. On-Page factors
  3. Key-Words
  4. Page content
  5. Web-site structure
  6. Off-Page factors
  7. Back-Links
  8. Testing
  9. Tools
  10. Conclusion

Research

What are you really trying to achieve?

All web-sites are different, some sell products, some sell services, some sell adverts and others are purely informative. Work out what you are actually trying to promote and finding the relevant Key-Words will be easier.

If your business is a mixed business, maybe you sell products and consultancy, prioritise the various areas and start by focusing on the most important areas first but keep the other areas in mind so that you don’t skew the focus of your web-site.

We will call these areas Cost-Centres. If you sell one product then you will only have one Cost-Centre e.g. Crockery. However if you run weekend workshops you could have "Crockery and Workshops", so two Cost-Centres.

If you find you have many Cost-Centres then it may be worth skipping or even combining some so that you can concentrate on the more important areas.

Create an SEO spreadsheet with the following columns.

Priority | Cost-Centre | Income | Cost | Profit | Key-Words
Priority – This is how important this area is to you
Cost-Centre – This is the name of your Cost-Centre e.g. Crockery
Income – How much you make from this Cost-Centre per month
Cost – The monthly cost required for this Cost-centre
Profit - The monthly profit for this Cost-Centre
Key-Words – The Key-Words for this Cost-Centre

Track the Income, Cost and Profit as far as possible and refer back to them as you progress through the stages.

What do your customers want?

I can be quite tricky to know for sure what your customers (or potential customers) might most want from your web-site and even tougher to guess the likely search terms they might use.

To get a clearer picture of your customers, it may help to create a fictional "Persona". Try to imagine your ideal customer and create a background "story" for them. This includes giving them a name, job and personal details such as family and hobbies and even their education. Keep adding details until you have a realistic and believable "ideal customer".

You can create more than one Persona to match the main types of visitors you want to attract.

Example of a Persona

Harold Potter SEO persona

Harold Potter - Managing Director of Smashing Crocks Ltd
Harold is a 40-year-old married man with two small children, his wife Sophia is a part-time book-keeper. He has a BA in Ceramic Design and relaxes at the weekend by throwing pots, literally!

Harold runs the company Smashing Crocks which make and sell crockery for fairs, circuses and theatres. These crocks are sold to be deliberately smashed, so they are cheap and when broken do not constitute a safety hazard. Harold is inventive, artistic and also a perfectionist. He is computer literate and carries out much of his day-to-day work by email and instant messaging. His motto is "can we do this better, more easily or make it more fun?"

Hobbies: sculpture, collecting old earthenware.

As you go through the SEO process and the restructuring of your site, refer back to this Persona by asking; "Will it work for Harold"? Does this provide what Harold would be looking for? Will this engage Harold?

Which Search Engine should you target?

You will almost definitely need to consider the big Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing but there are many more, some of which might be more relevant for your web-site.

Below is a list of the main Search Engines for general searches.

Rank Search Engine Searches

  1. www.google.com 70.10%
  2. search.yahoo.com 15.17%
  3. www.bing.com 10.10%
  4. www.ask.com 2.55%
  5. www.aolsearch.com 1.45%

Source: HitWise - 2010-12-06

However the list of (relevant) Search Engines may vary depending on which industry sector your business is in.
There may be a much more specific Search Engine for your sector.
See: searchenginewatch.com and Wikipedia - List of Search-Engines

Further research is covered in the following topics.

On-Page factors

On-Page factors include:

  1. Page title
  2. Description Meta tag
  3. Key-Word Meta tag
  4. Headings (h1, h2 etc…)
  5. Word emphasis (bold, italic, underline etc..)
  6. Key-Word positioning
  7. Page structure

To tackle these you first need to create a list of Key-Words.

Key-Words

Choosing the right Key-Words is crucial to the success of your SEO strategy, in fact it is probably also crucial to the success of your business. There is little point in selecting Key-Words that don’t relate to what you sell.

What you are looking for is a list of words and search phrases that your customers (see Persona) are likely to search on (e.g. "Crockery", "Cheap crockery") and if you get your SEO right, they can then find your web-site. If you get the Key-Words right then when they get to your web-site then they may also make a purchase.

Find your Key-Words

Creating a list of Key-Words is a circular exercise, as you will create an initial list and then modify this list as your research progresses.

There are several approaches to creating a list of Key-Words.

  1. Brainstorm and write down search queries.
  2. Get a group of friends or a focus group and ask them if they wanted one of your products, how they would search for it.
  3. Sign up for Google Adwords and use the "Key-Word tool" and "ad text ideas" generator.
  4. Use the SEOMoz Key-Word Difficulty tool (free).
  5. Use Wordtracker (paid).
  6. Examine your competitors’ sites and see what they are using c.f. Notes 3

Google Adwords will rank search terms by popularity, use this to list your Key-Words in order of an estimated chance of success.
10 = Less competition, more precise terms e.g. "Stage crockery" and easier to improve ranking.
1 = Lots of competition, very broad terms e.g. "Crockery" and much harder to improve ranking. 

Notes

  1. If a Key-Word has a Google Adwords Monthly Search total1 of over 100,000 then it might be wise to tackle that Key-Word at a later stage.
  2. Less competitive (Long-Tail) but targeted Key-Words will probably have a higher "conversion rate".
  3. With the Google Key-Word tool you can type in a competitors URL and get the Key-Words associated with their web-site2.
  4. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to find and explore the sites that link to your competitors.
  5. Use the Google toolbar to find back-links for the current URL
  6. You can also use the link:YourURLHere command 3 on Google, Bing or Yahoo to show all back-links to a URL

1 Use Local Search if your customers are UK based otherwise global.
2 Download the results as a CSV for further analysis in a spreadsheet.
3 The results will not be entirely equivalent.

Create a list of your competitors

Start with the Key-Words which have a higher chance of success "Long-Tail Key-Words".
Use Google.com to search using each Key-Word.

Notes

  1. If your customers are mostly UK based then you will probably want to use Google.co.uk
  2. You can also use the Google toolbar to research Back-Links.
  3. For each Key-Word examine the top 5 sites.

Analyse the data

Make a list of the top competitors for each Key-Word and then create a Spreadsheet with the following columns:

Name - Company Name.
URL - e.g. http://www.anotherdirectory.com
IP - the web-site’s IP Address - http://www.websiteipaddress.com/
Rank - Google Page-Rank.
Description - Short description of the web-site.
Title - Page title.
AnchorText - The anchor text used in the link to the competitor.
OutTotal - The total of outbound links on the web-site.
LinkTotal - The total number of back-links to the competitor.
LinkType - The type of back-links to the competitor (image, text, blog comment, article or listing).
In each row list the details for each web-site linking to your competitor.

The idea here is to analyse your competitor’s sites and find out why they were ranked for the selected Key-Word and how you can improve your web-site to beat them.
Create a separate worksheet for each Key-Word.
If you think that your Key-Word may have seasonal or otherwise time related variations, check them out using Google Trends.
Try searching for wedding gifts and you will see that there are more searches for that term in the middle of the year.
Use this data to refine your Key-Word list.

Notes

  1. If the listed page of a web-site is not the Home page then you have a good chance of out-ranking them.
  2. If the top 5 web-sites all have a Google Page-Rank of 5 or higher then it is probably better to try another Key-Word and tackle the competitive Key-Word later.
  3. Once you start to get traffic for less competitive Key-Words then you can move on to the more competitive "Short Tail" Key-Words.
  4. Look for your competitors’ sites that share the same back-links. Go to these back-link sites and see if you can also get a link.
  5. An "Authoritative" web-site is loosely defined as one which has many pages, a good Page-Rank, is often updated and it probably also has a "Community" www.bbc.co.uk is a good example.
  6. Ian Rogers has an interesting article on how Google Page-Rank works
  7. For some bed-time reading there is always the original Google research paper

Now that you have your list of Key-Words you can begin to structure your site around them but remember that your web-site is for use by humans and you want to make it more Search-Engine friendly without compromising the user experience.

If you haven't already, create yet another spreadsheet for your Key-Words.

You may also want to add a Key-Word Efficiency Index (KEI) column to the Key-Word spreadsheet. KEI is a measure of how likely you are to achieve a ranking for a particular search word.
The KEI formula is SearchesPerDay x (SearchesPerDay) / PageCount. Opinions on the usewfulness of KEI are divided.


Page Content

Decide which pages will contain which Key-Words, this is crucial. Use no more than a 3 or 4 Key-Words per page.

Page title

Add your main Key-Word(s) to the Title tag, make sure that each page has a different Title and that they are all under 70 characters long.
Combine Key-Words in the Title tag. Say you have three Key-Words: cheap crockery, safe break crockery, crockery for stage.
In this example, you can combine these in two ways. Chose the one that reads best.

  1. cheap crockery, safe break crockery for stage
  2. cheap crockery for stage, safe break crockery

This approach cuts down on your word count and when Google looks at your title it will still see all of your Key-Words. Combining Key-Words to cut down on the total number of words displayed in the title is a good way to boost the strength of each individual Key-Word, which will ultimately improve your ranking.

Description Meta tag

Write an interesting and human readable description of the current page using relevant Key-Words. Make sure that the body of the page has content relevant to the Key-Words you use. Don’t stuff with Key-Words or repeat Key-Words and don’t use more than 120 characters (Google can use up to 155 characters but 12o is a safe maximum). Google may use the description tag text for the "Snippet" that is shown when your site is listed, so make sure that it provides what your customers are interested in. Other Search Engines will use your description tag text, so it is worth getting it right.

Key-Word Meta tag

The Key-Word Meta tag is less important these days than it was but it is still worth adding your Key-Words to the Key-Word Meta tag.
The main possible advantage with the Key-Word Meta tag is to use it for synonyms and misspellings. This is legitimate and saves trying to put misspellings and synonyms in your body text which could detract from the readability.
Only add Key-Words relevant to your page, do not repeat Key-Words, separate Key-Words with a comma followed by a space.

Notes

  1. If you ask 10 SEO companies their view on this meta-tag you will probably get 10 different opinions.

Headings

Plan your page. Place the most important Key-Word(s), including if possible your most important Key-Word, at or near the top of the page in an <h1/> tag. Work down the page placing less important Key-Words in <h2/>, <h3/> etc…

Notes

  1. Do not add lots of <h1/> tags hoping to improve your ranking because it won’t.
  2. Make sure that the headings contain your Key-Words for the page and that they don’t use the same Key-Word structure as your <title/> tag.

Word emphasis

It is not certain whether emphasising words (Key-Words) by making them bold, italic or underlined will improve your Page-Ranking but like the Key-Word Meta tag, if it is done sensibly it can do no harm and may help.

Key-Word positioning

Apart from positioning your Key-Words logically in your headings it is also worth placing your main Key-Words near the bottom of the page, in the footer if possible.
Spread your Key-Words throughout the page text without to much clustering. Try to use one or two Key-Words per paragraph, not more and pay attention to readability; don’t sacrifice sense for Key-Words.

Page structure

Don’t duplicate content

Search Engines penalise duplicated content, so make sure that your copy is unique, otherwise you may damage your ranking.
If you buy-in content or copy-writing, check that it has not be copied, re-used or plagiarised by checking it using Copyscape or by pasting all or part of the text into a Search-Engine.
If you have more than one domain name pointing to one web-site this can appear to Search Engines as duplicate content.

Look closely at the following URLs:
http://www.yourdomain.com/
http://yourdomain.com/
http://www.yourdomain.com/default.htm
http://yourdomain.com/default.htm

Search Engines treat these as separate pages and may therefore consider them as duplicate content.
Decide which of the above you are going to use and stick with it. When creating internal links or asking other sites to link to you, make sure you always use the same URL.

Quality content

The more interesting your content is, the more likely it is that other sites will link to you. These in-bound links (Back-Links) are extremely valuable c.f. Link-Bait.
Take time to either write your own content or find a good copy-writer. The key is quality content one well written page with be more valuable for your customers and to link-building than a hundred mediocre articles.

Write content that your customers will find useful and/or interesting. If you don’t know what they will find useful, be bold, ask them what they want.
Write extra content such as how-to guides, FAQs, help and explanatory text that also makes use of your Key-Words.
Try to add fresh content as often as possible. Search-Engines like content changes.

You might want to consider outsourcing copy-writing, it need not be expensive and if you take your valuable time into consideration it can actually be, in relative terms, cheap.
Textbroker may be able to find you a copy-writer or search for "copy writer [your industry]". A good copy-writer should be treated as a good employee; trained, encouraged and rewarded and like good employees they take time to find, so if you find one keep hold of them.

Notes

  1. If you have any doubts about your content's originality and authenticity try putting it through Copyscape.
  2. Be careful about major structural changes to your web-site if you already have some page-ranking, as this may confuse Search-Engines and could adversely affect your ranking.

Image and text links

When creating links either to pages on your own site (Cross-Links) or to external URLs (Outgoing Links), ensure that the link text is descriptive and provides a clue to the link destination. This helps both visitors to navigate your web-site and Search Engines to index your pages.

Cross-Links are an important factor in SEO.
Wherever you can, refer to and provide links to other content within your web-site. Cross-Links keep visitors on your web-site longer, improve the usability by easily enabling the visitor to find what they are looking for and ultimately can improve your Search-Engine ranking.

Outbound links to other sites should open in a new window but it may be polite to inform the visitor that this is the case. There is a school of thought that forcing your visitors to open all outbound links is inappropriate, so you may wish to take a view on whether you enforce this or not. To avoid "leaking" Page-Rank you can also add a "rel=nofollow" attribute to outbound links.
e.g. <a href="anotherwebsite.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Go to another web-site</a> (opens in a new window)

Broken Links on your web-site don’t help anyone and may harm your ranking. Whilst you should regularly review and test all links on your web-site you can also use the w3.org link checker to check your web-site for broken links.

Notes

  1. If you run a forum or other system that allows visitors to post their own content you can add a nofollow meta tag to the page to avoid "leaking" outbound links especially to spammers. <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
  2. Links which have a "rel=nofollow" attribute may still be indexed by search engines.

Create a Site-Map

There are two types of Site-Map, HTML and XML. An HTML Site-Map is primarily for your customers and an XML Site-Map is solely for Search Engines.
Once your site gets beyond a couple of simple pages, an HTML Site-Map will prove valuable to your customers and may also help Search Engines index your web-site.
An XML Site-Map is essential to help Search Engines understand your web-site structure. Importantly you can include pages that Search Engines may not be able to get to via the links on your web-site.
XML Site-Maps can be quite complex and more details can be found on sitemaps.org

A simple Site-Map is shown below.

Robots text file

A robots.txt file is a small text file placed in the root of your web-site. This file, if it exists, is the first file read by a Search-Engine when indexing your web-site. The robots.txt file can tell a Search-Engine which directories and files not to read, it can also tell the Search-Engine where to find your sitemap.

A simple robots.txt file is shown below.

The robot.txt file is useful should you need to stop Search Engines from indexing any directories and for informing them of the URL for your Site-Map.

Micro-Formats

A Micro-Format is structured code that improves the machine-readability of the content within that code. Whilst there is some debate as to whether this will improve Search-Engine rankings, done correctly they can do no harm and can improve the visitor experience. The general consensus is that as more people use Micro-Formats then these will become a significant factor is SEO.
The list of sites using Micro-Formats is growing and includes Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, BaseCamp to name a few.
The most common Micro-Format is used for (postal) addresses, sometimes referred to as hCards. The format is relatively simple and there are also tools available to help you create the Micro-Format code.

An example of the hCard Micro-Format is below.

Source: Micro-Formats

e-commerce sites can probably benefit the most from the use of Micro-Formats but the implementation is more complex.

An example of the hProduct Micro-Format is below.

Source: Micro-Formats

Google can use Micro-Formatted data for "Rich Snippets". Here’s what they say:

"About rich snippets and structured data

Google tries to present users with the most useful and informative search results. The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier it is for users to decide whether that page is relevant to their search. With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating.

Providing this information doesn't affect the appearance of your content on your own pages, but it does help Google better understand and present information from your page. For example, it can be used to create rich snippets to be displayed on a search results page, or on a Place Page—a web page that organizes relevant information about a place.

….

(Note: Marking up your data for rich snippets won't affect your page's ranking in search results, and Google does not guarantee that markup on any given page or site will be used in search results.)"

Source: Google support

Notes

  1. The number of pages published with one or more hCards recently crossed the 2 billion mark
  2. Read the Google blog on Micro-Formats
  3. Google also has two interesting blogs on Rich Snippets and a new Rich Snippet Event format
  4. Some other Micro-Formats include:
    Recipes – hRecipe
    Calendars – hCalendar
    Reviews – hReview
    Résumés (CVs) – hResume

Web-site Structure

Hierarchy and Themes

Organise your web-site in a logical hierarchy.

Split your web-site into logical areas of interest or "Themes" and make sure that the path to any page is logical; this will help both your customers and Search Engines. If possible limit the your web-site hierarchy to 4 levels. Search-Engines may not index over this.

Try to limit the number of parameters in your URLs, this makes it easier for Search-Engines to index your web-site.

Custom 404 Page

For a visitor to your web-site, getting a 404 Page-Not-Found error can be an irritation at best, at worst you have lost a customer.
Don’t lose or upset visitors who try to go to a page that does not exist either because it has been moved, deleted or they have typed the wrong URL. Make sure that they still get something useful instead.
Create a page which potential customers are redirected to when a 404 error occurs.

The page you create should have as many as possible of the following but see Note 1:

  1. A link back to your home page and some helpful text explaining why the page they were looking for couldn’t be found.
  2. A Site-Map (see above) or at least a link to your Site-Map.
  3. If possible replicate your main site menu, although you must make sure that unless the menu can be dynamically created and therefore kept in synch, you must manually keep this menu up-to-date.
  4. If you have a search facility on your site, try to include it on your Custom 404 page.
  5. If you have moved or deleted any pages, consider adding links to the replacement pages.
  6. It is worth adding a simple feedback form so that if none of the above help, your visitor can ask for help or at least provide you with some (hopefully) useful feedback.

Notes

  1. Keep your custom 404 page below 512bytes as some browsers may ignore your beautifully crafted custom 404 page and instead show their "friendly" error page.
  2. It can also be helpful to built in an auto reporting mechanism to email you when ever this page is hit. Include the URL that caused the error.
  3. Test the page in as many browsers as possible.

Off-Page factors

Off-Page factors include:

  1. Back-Links
  2. Adwords
  3. Reviews

By far the most important of these is Back-Links.

Back-Links

One of the most important SEO factors is the number of other web-sites linking to your web-site. These are known as inbound or back links (Back-Links).
Set aside time to establish Back-Links on the best (most authoritative/high ranking) web-sites you can find.
Create a Back-Links spreadsheet with a list of web-sites that have content which is related to your industry sector and products.
If possible get a link back to your web-site on these related web-sites.
If any of these web-sites accept user content, sign up and post short interesting articles which contain links back to your web-site.
Add your site to any directory web-sites that are related to or contain listings for your industry sector.
Use the "Juicy Link Finder" to find sites that you might be able to get links on (not free).

Below is a list of directory sites which you can submit your web-site to. The list is UK biased and is by no means exhaustive. If you find any that are not listed here, let us know and we will add them in.

http://www.seobook.com
http://www.touchlocal.com
http://www.yalwa.co.uk
http://www.hotfrog.co.uk
http://www.vivastreet.co.uk
http://www.freeindex.co.uk
http://www.businessmagnet.co.uk
http://www.opendi.co.uk
http://www.xemion.com
http://www.thebestof.co.uk
http://www.approvedindex.co.uk
http://advertising.theigroup.co.uk
http://www.ufindus.com
http://www.cylex-uk.co.uk
http://www.city-listings.co.uk
http://www.oneentry.net
http://www.aboutus.org
http://www.internethelp.co.uk
http://www.linkdaddy.org
http://www.wikio.co.uk/addsource
http://www.scoot.co.uk
http://www.smilelocal.com
http://www.idorset.co.uk
 

Don’t forget to record in your Back-Links spreadsheet any links you establish as well as the web-sites that you are listed on but may not have back-links (yet). Also make sure to record the date the listings were added and any log-in details you may need to update your content.

Also see Quality Content: Create interesting content in your web-site which people will create links to. To help them and encourage the use of the correct link text you can even include on the page the code needed to create the link back to you. This may improve your chance of gaining Key-Word rich Back-Links.

The calculations for Back-Links are complex but there are a few simple rules.

  1. The more authoritative the sites are that link to you the better.
  2. The less outgoing links the better.
  3. Use your main Key-Words in the back-links where possible.
  4. Try to make sure that your Back-Links are distributed across your web pages but also that your home page is linked to the most.
  5. Use the nofollow attribute to avoid "leaking" Page-Rank unless you have agreed to exchange links.

Notes

  1. Note! The Page-Rank shown in the Google toolbar is not necessarily equivalent to the actual Page-Rank
  2. Avoid buying links from link-exchange sites as the Search-Engines may ignore these or even penalise you for using them.
  3. Don’t worry too much about outgoing links to good sites especially those that link back to you.
  4. Some directory sites charge for back-links. Even if you don't want to pay for a back-link it is probably still worth getting listed as it will raise the profile of your site.

Link-Bait

Link-Bait is content that is crafted specifically to encourage people to create links back to your web-site. It doesn’t have to be content that people necessarily agree with or even like, as long as they link back to you. People that regularly create links to web-sites have become known as the "Linkerati" a term first coined by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.
Like your Persona above, you can create a typical member of your targeted Linkerati and go from there.
If during your research you come across sites that also allow you to create content and link back to your own web-site, add them to your "Directory List".

Localisation

Search-Engines are becoming more location oriented.
Add hCard Micro-Format address data to every page on your web-site. Search-Engines will index this data and use it for location searches. Remember; just because you might not have a bricks-and-mortar shop, buyers often prefer to buy from a company that is nearer to them. When establishing Back-Links, make sure that you give local web-sites top priority. These may include your local Chamber of Commerce, other local businesses or local interest groups as well as web-sites that split their data by locality. When someone searches for one of your Key-Words with a location modifier then they could also get results which include one or more of the local sites that link back to your web-site.
Add a list of location-linking sites to your Back-Links spreadsheet. Use the list below as a starting point for local links. SubmitInMe has a list of some local linking sites (Mainly but not exclusively USA).
To find other web-sites that you might get a localised listing on, search for your Key-Words plus a part of your address, starting with the most local (town or city) and working up to your country. Do the same searches using neighbouring towns, cities, counties or states.

Note: If you do get listed on a web-site make sure you keep a note in your spreadsheet of the date of listing and any account information needed such as username and password. Don’t forget to keep this data secure as it will become more and more valuable as time goes on.

Social Media Marketing

Include a link to the major social media web-sites so that your visitors can easily bookmark your pages. One easy way to do this is to add code from addthis.com. AddThis also has a very useful analytics option. With AddThis analytics you can see which pages are the most popular and the interests that your "sharers" and "clickers" have. Using this information you can tailor your content to encourage these clickers and sharers.
The better your content the more people will share and click through to your web-site.

Consider creating content for social media web-sites such as videos. Videos can be added to:

  1. YouTube
  2. MySpace
  3. Google Video
  4. Yahoo Video
  5. Meta Cafe
  6. Daily Motion
  7. Vimeo
  8. Veoh
  9. Funky TV
  10. TinyPic http://tinypic.com/

Adwords

Google Adwords can help boost your traffic but will (possibly) never beat getting your site listed organically. However it is a good way to get your SEO campaign started and can get you listed where you might not otherwise get listed and also it is more achievable if the cost warrants it.
Adwords is advertising and like any advertising it needs to be targeted for it to work. The beauty of Adwords is that you can choose the target – to a point. Make sure the Key-Words you use are relevant in the same way as you have done for all the other SEO methods. However this time it is much more important, this time it will cost you money for every click-through. So unless you manage to convert a sufficient percentage of these visitors into buyers then you are possibly wasting your money.
Make sure that your Headline and Adword copy is attractive and relevant.

Dynamic Key-Word Insertion
Google Adwords has an advanced feature called "Key-Word Insertion", which allows advertisers to control how the Advert headline is displayed. It is a complex subject well explained by Google

Google display network
If you want to get your ads seen on sites other than the Google search, have a look at the Google display network.
Advertising on the Google Display Network can increase your conversion rate as the displayed ads are more targeted.

Google products
If you sell products, you might consider adding them to Google products You sometimes see these links for Google Products when searching.
You may need to enlist the help of a developer for this.

Reviews

Make a list of web-sites which allow visitors to write reviews or other content. Sign up to as many as possible write reviews of your product. Be careful not to make your content an obvious self-promotion, include information that people might find useful and keep your links back to your web-site as subtle as possible.

Remember that many of these review type sites will add "rel=nofollow" attributes to outgoing links so you may not gain Page-Rank but you may gain traffic, and hopefully more sales.

Testing

Once your SEO strategy is in place you must test the results and optimise where necessary.
On a regular basis (once a month or so) use the main Search-Engines to search using your Key-Words. Make a note of the date of the search and the position of your site for each Key-Word and each Search-Engine.

Take a screen-shot of your results and store as a record for future reference. Name the images so you know what they contain. Use the format YYYYMMDD__Key-Word_SearchEngineName.jpg e.g. 20101201_Crockery_google.co.uk.jpg this allows for easy sorting of your images.
If you find that any Key-Words or other parts of your SEO strategy are not working, modify to improve your results.

Test and analyse again.

Tools

Install the Google toolbar. With the Google toolbar you can easily research your competitors’ Page-Ranks and Back-Links.

SEO Elite brings together in one software package all the spread-sheet type analysis mentioned earlier plus many other tools.

Use Link-Assistant's SEO Spyglass to research your competitors.

Key-Word Discovery, Wordtracker, and Google Key-Word Suggestion Tool can help you to research your Key-Words.

Sign up for Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools , and Bing Webmaster Centre.

Conclusion

Checklist

  1. Let Google Analytics run for a couple of weeks before doing any SEO.
  2. Analyse and profile your competitors.
  3. Analyse and profile your customers.
  4. Create a set of Key-Words.
  5. Set goals that can be measured.
  6. Set up your tools for measuring success.
  7. Ensure that all pages have unique text in the <Title /> tag.
  8. Do not use the same title tag more than once.
  9. Include targeted Key-Words in the <Title /> tag.
  10. Add Key-Words and human friendly text in the < Meta> Description tag Put your most critical Key-Words first, make sure it reads well, and remember that only the first 150 characters are shown.
  11. Use Key-Words in the URL (or web address).
  12. Include Key-Words in the <Body />.
  13. Key-Words should be used in heading tags <h1/> <h2/> <h3/> and <h4/>.
  14. Key-Words should be used in alternate text for images.
  15. Add your location to Google webmaster tools.
  16. Remove www or non-www version of your site.
  17. Add a robots.txt file.
  18. Set up an HTML sitemap page.
  19. Consider using Micro-Formats.
  20. Ensure there are no page errors.
  21. Check and fix any broken links.
  22. Check and fix links to your home page so that you only use one version throughout.
  23. Create a useful 404 page.
  24. Check on your competitors.
  25. Research and add your site to directories, blogs, review sites etc…
  26. Test, record and analyse your results.
  27. Modify your Key-Words and tactics as needed.
  28. Review and repeat.

Notes

  1. The meta description should be written to appeal to the searcher and entice a click.
  2. Even if you provide a Meta description, Google may still use a snippet of the content from the page if they think it is a more appropriate representation of the page content.
  3. Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts on their opinions of the elements that comprise Search-Engine ranking-factors

Things NOT to do

  1. Use "Click here" in a link. Link text is important and "Click here" means nothing.
  2. Hide text from visitors (white text on white background) this can get your site banned or penalised.
  3. Introduce misspellings to your text or content in the hope of catching a few illiterate or lazy surfers.
  4. Cram Key-Words into your Title, meta descriptions, image alt description or content, it looks bad for humans and search engines and may cause your ranking to fall
  5. Use Key-Words that aren’t related to your products or service, people don’t like to be tricked into landing on a non-relevant site.
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