If your site isn’t optimized for search engines (SEO=search engine optimization) you’re missing out on oodles of traffic that you could be getting from searches on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other engines. This guide makes implementing SEO practices easy because it takes you through everything step by step and everything is FREE. I’ve partnered with Zach Olsen who does SEO and PPC for Crocs and blogs about it at bydatabedriven.com.

If you read Build a Life-Changing Website, you know the value of having a site that brings you potential suitors you would never meet otherwise. This isn’t for the faint-hearted though. Optimizing the crap out of a site takes some work. Are you ready to get your hands dirty?

Keyword Research
Open up the Google adwords keyword tool. Start by searching the words you think people will use. The tool will show you which related terms are the most searched for and which terms have the most competition. Your goal here is to identify the key search phrase that you’ll use as the foundation for your SEO work. For example, I have a client who is a therapist in Albuquerque. However, “Counseling Albuquerque” gets far more searches than “Therapist Albuquerque,” so “Counseling Albuquerque” is the key phrase I used to optimize her site.

When choosing your key phrase, there are times where it pays to be specific. Let’s say your launching a photography website. First, the competition for “photography” is going to be so fierce, it’s probably not a smart goal to try to make it to Google’s first page for that term. In this case, the more you can find a niche to specialize in, the better your chance of dominating that market. “Black and white portrait photography” is a good example.

You can also use operators to focus your search when you use a popular term. For example, the “allintitle:” operator will show you only those sites that have your search term in the title of the page. So allintitle:photography will only pull up sites that have photography in the title and will leave out sites that just mention photography somewhere in the body copy. These sites are much more likely to be your competition.  If you put quotes around a term like “portrait photography,” then Google only shows pages that have those two words together as a phrase.

Pay attention to the ratio between search volume and competition for a search term. For example, ‘acupuncturist’ has 135K monthly searches according to Google’s keyword tool and 133K results when you search for that word on Google, while allintitle:”acupuncture clinic” has 74K monthly searches but only 108K competing results, 25K less than “acupuncturist”. If you choose to make “acupuncture clinic” your key search phrase you get 34% less monthly searches, yet you deal with 81% less competition.

Use Google Insights for Search to compare your top 5 favorite keywords. This will show you a graph of the number of searches for this term since Google’s inception in 2004 so you can see trends. For example, searches for “acupuncture clinic” have been on a slow decline for the past six years. However, searches for “pain relief” have been on the rise since 2008.

Once you’ve established your key search phrase, you need to develop a long tail strategy. “Long tail” refers to the huge list of keywords that only get a few clicks a month. While these keywords don’t get big volume, if you rank high for a lot of them, you’ll still bring a good amount of traffic to your site. Plus, these terms have less competition and because they’re typically more specific (‘graphic designer in california who does illustration’ instead of ‘graphic designer’) the people using them know exactly what they’re looking for and they’re more likely to dive into your content and become a customer. SEMpai offers a pretty slick tool for generating long tail keywords. You can also use the Google keyword tool to get the most common variants of the phrases you want to target in your long tail strategy. Your goal here is to make an exhaustive list of every possible search term a visitor might use to find your site.

When you’re finished you can download all your applicable search phrases from the Google keyword tool in a CSV format, which you can import to Microsoft Excel and create a spreadsheet.  Look under the words ‘Keyword ideas’ for the gray box that says ‘download.’ Here’s an example of some research I did for a dentist (names and places have been changed). One tab has all the research and the other has the new titles, descriptions, keywords and copy changes for each page of the site so that when I’m ready I can copy and paste to make all the changes at once. Plus sometimes the client likes to see what changes are being made and this is an easy-to-digest way of looking at them. You’ll also see I’m using the “=len(” function to count how many characters in each cell so that I make sure my titles don’t get truncated by Google’s character limit which is about 65 characters (including spaces) for titles and 160 for descriptions.

In the end, all research aside, keywords should be based on what niche or value proposition the business is in. Ranking well for something that gets a lot of traffic but doesn’t fit the business’ core competency is a fail. Talk to the business owner and figure out what kind of visitors with what kind of intentions are the best fit and target those keywords. You may not get the most traffic, but the traffic you do get will be a perfect fit.

Keyword Competition Research

Now that you know what keywords you’re targeting, you want to take a look at who is ranking highly for these keywords and what they’re doing to get that high ranking.

Before you start the process, here’s a super simplified rundown on how search engines rank content. There are two parts to the equation: keywords and links. First the search engine checks to see where your keywords are located. The more prominent the location, the more weight is given by the search engine. So a keyword in your title carries more weight than a keyword in your body copy. A keyword that comes at the beginning of a title carries more weight than a keyword that comes at the end. But search engines are wary if they see the keyword in your copy too often because they suspect you of ‘keyword stuffing’ to try to artificially enhance your ranking. Search engines also want to see that you have lots of pages, a wide variety of content, and that you update your site often, because all of those things signal value for visitors.

The real boost in search engine ranking comes from backlinks. Search engines assume that a high number of quality sites linking back to your site means that you provide quality content. You also want to have a healthy number of outgoing links and internal links (links that go from one part of your site to another) but backlinks are the holy grail for getting a high ranking. This is a great illustrated example from SEOmoz of what to look for.

Now that we have a basic understanding of how you get ranked highly in search engines, let’s figure out what your competition is doing to rank ahead of you. First we’ll start by analyzing their keyword usage. Go to their homepage and look for every place they’ve inserted the keywords you want to outrank them for. Pay special attention to titles and headers (big bold text that leads a paragraph.) Remember the chocolate donuts example. How does this site compare? Anything they’re not doing? We’re just trying to get an idea of how hard it will be to outrank them right now.

Next we’ll take a look at their backlinks. There are a few tools you can use for this. Backlinkwatch, and Yahoo Site Explorer are two I use on a regular basis. Again, you’re looking to see if they have a high volume of backlinks. If so, then you know you have your work cut out for you. You also want to export this data into a spreadsheet. Knowing what sites have backlinked to your competition will help you overtake them when we move on to Phase 2.

If you really want to get in-depth, Google’s new Ad Planner tool will give you a clear picture of the demographics of your competition. Avinash Kaushik has a quality how-to post here.

Creating a Baseline to Measure Success

If you already have a website and your host doesn’t provide any tracking tools, install Google Analytics. Not only will you use these tools to tweak your SEO efforts, they’ll also give you a clear picture of your progress as you build traffic.

In the advanced segments dropdown in Analytics, check the default segment “Non-Paid Search Traffic.” This is what you are trying to get to go up and to the right in your SEO endeavors. Measuring the amount of traffic you get in and of itself won’t get you very far very fast. What you need to measure are outcomes. After all, ranking high for your favorite keywords is the means to the end, not the end itself, right? So set up some goals. There are URL destination goals, like tracking people who make it to your “purchase confirmation page” to register a sale or a “thank you page” after some one has emailed you and you have a new lead. If yours is a blog, maybe you want to measure events like comments and RSS feed subscribers. Other default goals you can set up  are time on site and pages per visit. Every time a visitor views 3 or more pages on my site I’m considering that a goal because it shows that my content is sticky. If the new traffic you are driving to your site doesn’t convert then it’s a big waste of effort, so make sure you are measuring not just how much traffic you get, but the value of that traffic.

Now we’re going to create a “before” report to help you measure your progress as your SEO campaign kicks in. Use SEObooks Rankchecker tool to identify where your page ranks currently for your favorite selected keywords. You’ll have to give them an email address, click a link in the email they send you, then go to “tools” in their nav bar and go down to the blue bowling ball with the orange stars emanating from it. You have to download Rankchecker (and Firefox if you don’t have it) and then restart Firefox to get it up and running.

When you restart Firefox the flaming blue bowling bar will be in the tool bar of your browser. Click it, enter your domain and the keywords you want to rank for and then hit start at the bottom left. It will tell you where you rank on Google, Yahoo and Bing. So far BigFuckingLogo.com ranks number 1 for the keywords “Big Fucking Logo” on all three!

Webmaster Tools

Signing up for Google Webmaster Tools is another great way of figuring out your current organic ranking status. Once you verify your site you can get access to rad charts like these that show you how may impressions, average position and click-through rate your site is showing up for organically. You’ll also be able to troubleshoot things like broken links, malware and your sitemap and get a list of keywords visitors are using to find your site.

When you’ve finished all your research and you’re ready to implement your newfound SEO knowledge, read Phase 2 here. And if you’re ready to build a blog to practice SEO, share your passion with the world and build a career that makes dreams come true, check out Build a Life-Changing Website Part 3 for a step by step guide.

With love and affection,

Fernando

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