11 Steps to SEO in Plain English (steps 1 to 5) by Tim Meadows Smith

One of piece of 'new media jargon' that has got the vast majority of business leaders confused is SEO, search engine optimisation. Too many people have been charged too much for either inappropriate or ineffective SEO services, often because the supplier does not really understand it either. This article is pitched for people who are not experienced or very knowledgeable when it comes to SEO, what it is for and what it can do.

If you have focused objectives and a clear online strategy then SEO will almost always be a good cost effective addition to the marketing tool set. The first thing to understand is that search engine businesses, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, have customers to satisfy too. Their customers are searching and they expect to see the 'best and most relevant' search results. I expect like me, you get frustrated if your searches bring irrelevant results first. No one should be surprised, the methods search engines use to prioritise results are designed to satisfy the searcher. They work hard to eliminate bogus SEO services that aim to cheat.

It is possible for you to make your website 'the best and most relevant' for certain searches and to convince the search engine operator you are just that too. That is SEO. Each of my 11 steps to SEO heaven is necessary. I assume that you will be committed to a long term marketing strategy, and to measuring results with a view to adjusting your activity. The steps include those of preparation as well of those of continuous repeated activities. The early preparatory steps are perhaps the most important as errors here will frustrate the effectiveness of the later ones.

Armed with our clear objectives and online strategy:

Step 1 to SEO Heaven - Keyword Research

A vital first step that should not be undertaken lightly. Whilst experienced pay per click advertisers will know that you can easily test and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, they should understand this not possible for organic search optimization. It is normally advisable to concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site around a core theme. Then, for individual pages only one to three phrases. For large sites with hundreds of pages is it hard to optimize every single page, the effort and cost of SEO to the full extend produces diminishing returns.

Step 2 to SEO Heaven - Competitive Intelligence

SEO is competitive, there is only one front page, only one top slot so it is important to know you competition and perform better. What are they doing? Where do they rank, for which Key words? Who is linking to their website and why? The less competitive your industry is online the easier is it for you to outperform your competition. This is an important determining factor in the cost and resources necessary to achieve your desired SEO outcome.

Step 3 to SEO Heaven - Web Design and Development

Like trying to cable an old building for modern communications, or boosting performance of an obsolete machine, fixing a bad website design is much tougher than building properly from scratch. When you create a new website, make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. It is almost always a long job to properly prepare a table based (templated) website for SEO. A good design from the start will save you a lot of time and money. In most cases it will put you ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. In most cases a high performing design for SEO is also a user friendly design but occasionally compromise is necesary.

Step 4 to SEO Heaven - Get Your First Inbound Links

There is no need to pay to submit your website to any search engine. Just as soon as you create inbound links from other websites to yours the search engines will find your website.

There are plenty of scam products and services. Avoid them. They are a waste of your money. No one can guarantee you a number 1 ranking it must be earned and maintained by being best and most relevant.

There are some web directories that are recognised by search engines and gaining a trade listing there will be a helpful kick-start to your SEO campaign. Then ask your customers and suppliers to place a link to your website from theirs, most will be pleased for the favour to be returned.

Step 5 to SEO Heaven - Sitemaps

The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines also provide reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the submission of a site map to the search engines, is it advisable to create an account and register your website with them, just for the reports and statistics they provide free of charge and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

With the first 5 steps complete they should be scheduled for occasional review whilst the remaining tasks require regular and repetitive effort. In Eleven Steps to SEO Heaven (steps 6 to eleven) we look at taking a website that is SEO ready site with a campaign ready to run and look at the steps and work needed to claim a high search engine ranking.

About The Author Tim Meadows-Smith is a hands on investor in early stage and turnaround businesses. He works as an experienced non-executive chairman, director, business advisor and mentor. Tim has a classical marketing background gained internationally with famous global brands. He helps business leaders take the jargon out of online marketing. Reach Tim by email at Tim@Meadows-Smith.com further articles at http://www.timmeadows-smith.co.uk/

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Steps to Advanced

Some keyword research is surface-level, fire and forget type stuff. If you just need to see relative volume levels, then a basic keyword research tool is all you need. If, however, you want to really dive deep and get the full skinny on your keywords, I'd recommend having each of these data points.
There are three sources on the web that I've found to work best for comparative numbers research. These are:
Google Adwords: Keyword Tool - enter any term or phrase and get back data about both the average search volume and the volume from the previous month.MSN AdCenter: Research Keywords Tool - you need to be logged in to use this, but the data is solid and shows actual counts.Wordtracker: Keyword Tool - although the numbers Wordtracker shows are frequently less accurate than the two above, they are reasonably decent for estimating comparative search volume. Unfortunately, due to the declining share of Wordtracker's data sources (the Infospace owned search engines - Metacrawler, Dogpile, DoGreatGood, etc.), niche and long tail term volume estimates can be way off.

Here's why I don't use Yahoo!:

From there, rather than build a spreadsheet just showing raw numbers, I like to work in comparative sizes (the real numbers rarely prove accurate anyway). Thus, rather than having a graph of data like this:
I can have one like this:
Note how, in this view, I'm showing the relative volume percentage of the demand for keyword "SEO" made up by "seo services" and "seo tools." This graph tells me that while Google thinks "seo tools" and "seo services" are tiny fractions of the volume that comes in for the broad term, "SEO," Microsoft & Wordtracker both say these phrases make up a more substantive percentage. Since keyword targeting is really about choosing one keyword over another and much less about trying to estimate exact traffic, the latter system makes much more sense to me.
When are your queries in highest demand? Knowing the answer can help you predict when competition may ramp up and additional SEO efforts are needed as well as provide insight into your market overall (if demand has been dropping steadily over the last few years, you might want to target some different terms, or even shift product focus). Two sources of data are solid on this front:
Google Trends for Keywords

MSN AdCenter Labs: Keyword Forecast Tool

In order to get a full understanding of the competitive landscape, it's essential to know who's ranking for the terms you're targeting. A basic query is a great start, but I like to append those with a bit of extra data, as I've visualized below:

Those three are my favorite pieces of link data to append, not because they alone are predictive of rankings, but because the range so perfectly illustrates what's necessary, on both the URL and domain level to be competitive. Nick's been pushing hard to get this functionality automatically included with the SEOmoz Toolbar, so hopefully we can make that happen in the next few months.
The fresh web (aka social media sphere) can help to show how often keywords are appearing in content and conversation in blogs, forums, feeds and more. It's particularly valuable for identifying emerging trends which may not yet have search volume (but will if the conversational content acceleration continues). There's a few tools I like on this front:
Facebook Lexicon

There appears to be some correlation between "party tonight" on Friday and "hangover" on Saturday
Twist: See Trends in Twitter

Blogscape

Google News Trends

I'd love to see some of those 19th century SEO tools!
The real value (and reason for spending time in these sectors) is to:
A) Identify patterns or trends indicating a keyword/product/concept is on the rise/fallB) Find content that in the past has attracted large amounts of attention around these keywords (an excellent starting point for viral content development)C) Locate portals on the web or in social communities where your topic may be hot, and opportunities for promotion or links exist
They're not universally valuable for every part of keyword research, and you shouldn't trust the volumes to predict keyword demand (some things get written about more than they get searched), but a good SEO leaves no opportunity un-investigated.
It's wise to be aware of where and how your keywords can cross over into vertical search results. The best way to do this currently is, unfortunately, manually. You'll want to:
Search for your target terms at the major search enginesIdentify any vertical results that appears in the top 10-20 listingsEmploy strategies to reach into the applicable verticals
The most common and highest value are typically:
LocalProductNewsImagesBlogVideo
What are the goals of the individuals searching for your targeted keywords? What phase of the decision process are they in? Answering these questions can give you an excellent idea of the potential ROI from drawing in traffic on a given term/phrase. Many times the highest volume keywords are not bringing in the best traffic.
Some good resources on this front include:

Your goal should be to narrow down the potential tasks a visitor who has just performed the query wants to accomplish. This can dramatically boost your site's performance when coupled with delivery of those paths upon arrival.
The best way to determine the relevance between a keyword and the content/service/product you offer is to test. Run a PPC campaign or dig into your analytics and choose only those visitors that have come via the search query. Pull out data like browse rate, time spent on site, conversions, etc.

The majority of visits who come into SEOmoz for the keyword "SEO Blog" stick around to read at least a couple of pages
Relevance is highly actionable data because it does such a good job predicting which keywords are going to bring valuable traffic. While branded terms often perform highly (and are typically easy to rank well on), longer tail and more specific queries also have this tendency to be more relevant (and, again, are easier to achieve).
Even if you're not planning on bidding for keywords through paid search campaigns, it's wise to know what the competition is doing and how much value they're getting from it (and what they're willing to pay). A few good resources for this information include:
MSN AdCenter's Keyword Estimate

I really like what AdCenter does with this spiffy graph - showing the cost and estimated clicks in an easy-to-read graphic. Just remember that MSN is the engine with the fewest advertisers, which often means pricing is less aggressive than on Google or Yahoo!
Google AdWords Traffic Estimator
I'm a bit less fond of Google's standard take on the data, but their pricing is the gold standard, as AdWords has the highest number of advertisers and the most traffic by far.

SEMRush
A solid tool with a lot of uses, particularly for competitive keyword analysis, SEMRush shows some decent numbers around the average CPC and competition levels for most keywords at the head of the demand curve.

Take the cost-per-click data and competition levels into account when you're considering things like relevance, potential conversion rates and visitor value. Most companies aren't dumb - if they're bidding high dollar values for potential visits, they're converting those visits into dollars and that means you can both learn from them and find strategies to outperform.
Related queries is an easy metric to understand - you want to know what other terms searchers who used these keywords also employed. It's a no-brainer to then add these to your list of potential keyword targets. Many good sources for this data exist:
Google shows related searches in both their AdWords Tool and through web search (you'll want to click the "show options" link at the top followed by the "related searches" link in the sidebar)Bing, Microsoft's new engine, shows related searches by default in their web search interfaceYahoo! Search has their "also try" list and clicking "more" will give you an interface just below the search box that finds lots of great, relevant keywordsThe aforementioned SEMRush shows great data on this (though you'll need to sift through as there can be a lot of junk) if you're a paying memberCompete.com's Search Analytics has good information by query and website, though you'll need to subscribe to their service to get the full value
Get the related queries, dig into the data about them and target those that have enough volume and relevance to help you get increase valuable traffic from SEO.
Last, and probably least in most cases, it's wise to do some research into the legalities surrounding the keywords you'd like to target. Using trademarked terms and phrases on your site can cause attorney trouble, and no one likes that. The place to start, at least in the United States, is here - USPTO Trademark Electronic Search System.
Whew... That's a lot of work for keyword research - now you can see why some firms charge hundreds of dollars per hour for this type of deep dive. Put these recommendations to good use, though, and you'll have an impressive set of terms to target - and that can be a serious competitive advantage.
I've undoubtedly left out a few metrics and, as always, appreciate any ideas or suggestions you've got on this topic.
VisitsPageviewsAvg. Time on PageDirect TrafficSearch TrafficReferral TrafficYikes, looks like something went wrong. Please try again later.
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