SEO Guide - Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide

Search Engine Optimization is a procedure which helps an existing website to maximize its traffic from Search Engines. This is done by improving the position of website in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP) when a particular keyword related to that site is searched.

Although basics of SEO can be learned in a matter of days, but it need long practice and experience to master the art of SEO. It is a never lasting process where learning can never be stopped as Search Engines are regularly updating their algorithms to provide best results to their user.

Basically SEO process or you can say Search Engine Optimization Cycle can be divided in three major steps:


1) Analysis & Research: Which includes Industry Analysis, Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis.

2) On Page Optimization: It includes all SEO work on website such as Content Optimization, Image Optimization, Search Engine Friendly URL's, Proper Meta Tag Optimization, Code Optimization, Interlinking, Proper Site Navigation Structure and Sitemap etc.

3) Off Page Optimization: Off page optimization is basically intended to promote your website in Search Engines by getting backlinks to your site. It includes getting backlinks to your website through various resources such as Directories, Other Websites of similar nature, Blogs, Article Sites and Social Media Sites.

This is one of the most important phases in SEO. A well planed SEO means half work done. This part can be divided in two major parts.


1) Industry and Competitor Analysis

2) Keyword Analysis and Research

This refers to identifying the most profitable marketplace where you can generate maximum ROI. Remember this is only applicable if you are planning for a new site but don't have any clear idea about your topic.

If you are know your site topic already, your industry analysis will include searching for a profitable niche in your target industry. Suppose you want to do something in Health Industry; then some of the niches related with Health industry will be:

Weight Loss
Acne
Beauty Products
Eating Disorders
Body Building etc. etc.

How to find potential Sub Niches:

My personal approach while looking for some good sub niches is to go to Ezine Articles. Here on home page you can see many topics and sub topics. Just have a look at this and you will find what you want. You can also go to some big directories such as DMoz or Yahoo Directory and do some research on categories provided there.

Now as you have decided some appropriate niches, your next step will be to check out which of the sub niche you want to work with. This depends upon your personal interest, income opportunities, and competition in Search Engines etc.


Competitor Research

Do some quick searching on Search Engines and find the how many sites are there related to your niche, check the pages indexed of these site, external links coming to that site and authority and PR of those sites. It will give you a rough idea of what efforts you need to get top 10 Search Engine rankings.

There is am amazing tool by which you can do all this very easily. SEO Firefox Extension Tool by SEO Book will help you to analyze all sites related to your niche. It is free and you have to just download it and start analyzing.

A Keyword may be defined as a search query which a potential search engine user may use to search for particular information. Keywords are in the core of all Search Engine Algorithms. A search Engine works on retrieving the most relevant results for a particular search query (keyword) from their database.

Suppose I want to search for some information about Cars, then the potential keywords will vary according to my requirement. Here is a quick example:

Information I need

Keywords I May Use

Personal Loan

Personal Loan, Personal Loan Rates

Mobile Phones

Latest Mobile Phones, Mobile Phone Rates

Cars

Car Models, Car Prices, Car Loans

Thus, for a proper keyword research you need to identify your potential visitors and work for those keywords to get maximum targeted traffic. A targeted traffic will help you to achieve maximum conversion thus helping you to get maximum ROI.

Keyword analysis is the key of Search Engine Optimization. Keyword analysis is the step which will decide the future of your website.

One thing that mustbe cleared that Main purpose of an SEO is not to get #1 ranking for a keyword, but to drive more and more traffic on your website through organic means. You can easily get high SERP rankings for some uncompetitive keywords, but if these keywords are not generating traffic, then ranking is worthless.

So the main aim in keyword research is to find some good potential keywords for your website, with a huge search volume but less competition. It is not easy to search for such keywords, but with enough practice you can get something that you can handle with a little effort.

A common misconception about keyword research is that a SEO must always search for some low competitive keyword with satisfactory search volume. But this is not always true. This depends on your requirement (or client requirement), your long term plans for the site and resources you have. If you are planning a big website and you have enough resources you can target highly competitive keywords with high search volumes.

These keywords take some time to optimize and will need much more efforts to get good search engine rankings, but eventually the return on investment will be higher.

Less competitive keywords are best if your site is either a small affiliate website targeting on a sub niche or is targeted for a particular geographical region like a city or state. So first you need to decide what your long term plans are before working on keyword research.

Keyword research can be done in a 4 step process:




Step I Think of the all possible phrases that any potential user may type to find information or service your site provides.

Step II If you have access to analytics reports of some website related to your industry, you can collect some accurate data from it.

Step III All keywords and phrases you have collected in step 1 and 2 will now to be applied on some good keyword research tool. By this you can find some important data about keywords such as how much is the competition, daily visitor volume, Keyword Effectiveness and Keyword Difficulty.

You can use some good keyword tools for this. Some of the best keyword tools are Keyword Elite (My Personal Recommendation), Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker and Google's Keyword Tool. Although there are many more such tools but these three are best known for their great performance, accurate results and amazing support.

Keyword Difficulty Tool by SEOmoz is also very helpful if you want to find the achievable keywords for your site.

Step IV Keyword research continues after you start getting some traffic on your website. This is done by analyzing data provided by Traffic Analysis tools, where you can find the keywords which are being used to find your site on Search Engines. This will give you more realistic data about Conversion rates and keyword profitability.

Measuring Keyword Competition is important and must be done in a right way to get most accurate data. Just Google following queries and record what you get.


1) Allintitle:"Keyword": This will show you how many sites are using that particular keyword in their title.

2) Allinanchor:"Keyword": This will show you how many sites have backlinks targeted with the specified keyword.

3) Allinurl:"Keyword": This will show you how many sites have that exact keyword in their URL (Either in Domain Name or in Page Name).

You must also check out the Top 10 sites ranking for your targeted keyword and check their authority, Page Rank, Backlinks (link:http://www.yourcompetitor.com) and Pages Indexed. You will get an idea how much work you need to rank for a particular keyword or phrase.

I have already mentioned that whether you look for the major keywords (Top Level Keywords) or Long Tail Keywords (keywords by combining some phrases to your primary keyword) depends upon your long term goal and resources/time you can invest to optimize on your website. Although if you can manage to get top rankings for a top level keyword you will get blast of traffic, but Long tail keyword are also beneficial if you talk about ROI.

Following are some major benefits of using long tail keywords:

1) Long Tail Keyword attracts more targeted traffic.

2) It is easy to optimize for long tail keywords. Although you may face hard competition on long tail keyword in some over saturated markets. If you don't believe check this out How to Lose Weight Fast. Got it!

3) Traffic generated with long tail keywords often provides higher conversion rates.


Thus by all these examples you can see that keyword research is a complex process that needs lots of brainstorming. You need to use right tools, collect lots of data, arrange a huge number of data, analyze all that data according to your needs and then continue tracking the results.

I am very sorry for those who have always thought of Keyword Research as a simple and quick SEO activity. Keyword Research needs lot of hard work and is like building the foundation of your internet empire.

Keyword Elite 2.0 is a PAID keyword research software by an eminent SEO Expert Brad Callen. The reason I have underlined the term "Paid" is because there are lots of free keyword research tools available on internet.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Research Tool absolutely free of cost. Wordtracker also has a Free Version available. There are also some more keyword suggestion tools that are freely available although their accuracy is not guaranteed. My point is:


"If there are free tools available, then why am I spending money on getting Paid Tools like Keyword Elite 2.0?"

Well, here is my personal experience:

My Introduction with Keyword Elite 2.0:

I am a SEO and my job responsibilities needs me to research a lot to find out most profitable keywords for my clients as a part of my SEO projects. As I have already described above that keyword research is a process which needs lots of brainstorming (you will get to know this when you do it practically) and making excel reports to find out many different parameters. So I always search for good tools that can help me to some extent.

When I first introduced to the sales page of Keyword Elite 2.0, it looked like same over pitched heavy sales page with lots of over hyped promises of huge internet income in a short span of time, which I am used to come across in my affiliate marketing experience. But when I read their sales page, I eventually find out that it is actually targeted to all those "Internet Marketing Professionals" who are desperate to overcome the tough competition and looking for some help that can automate their time consuming activities such as Keyword Research (Check Their Sales Page Yourself).

It is a fact that Brad Callen is a renowned Online Marketing Expert and can easily understand the actual problems of other online marketers. That's why Keyword Elite 2.0 is bestseller among all keyword research tools available.

Keyword Elite is like an automatic assistance system that assist me in brainstorming huge list of potential keyword select which is best for me. It is a huge time saver as it makes the whole process of analyzing and filtering the keyword much more efficient that it can be manually. Besides this, I also get lots of additional reports that I was unable to get out while I work manually.

It has 8 different modules which work according to your requirement and provide you such a clean and easily understandable end results that you will be surprised. It takes only few minutes to do all the keyword research process which usually take 5-6 days manually and give fat better results.

You can Watch Keyword Elite in Action Here in these videos. Watching these videos will actually let you know what it can do for you. You can then decide yourself if you want to buy it or not. Just scroll down to the middle of that page to watch the videos.

Do you Need Keyword Elite 2.0?

Keyword Elite is best for you if you are trying your luck in the amazing field of Affiliate Marketing, Running PPC campaigns or regularly work on many SEO projects. Keyword Elite will save lot of your time in this cutting edge era of online marketing and huge competition.

As I fall in all three categories written above Keyword Elite 2.0 is like a blessing to me. If you are also one, then I recommend you to try Keyword Elite 2.0. It worked for me and it can do magic for you also.

David Naylor aka DaveN is known for his SEO expertise around the world.

With a rich experience of about 13 years, he is an industry leader in SEO and Internet Marketing. He has worked with diverse industries and clients and helped them to increase ROI as well as rankings on various Search Engines.

You can find more about him at http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/

I think you have understood keyword research to some extent by now. If you need more information about Keyword Research you can get Professional Keyword Research Guide by SEOMoz. This is an extensive keyword research methodology explained in 75 pages.

Now let's move to the next step that is On Page Optimization. On page optimization is referred to all those activities that are performed on page i.e. on our own website. A well optimized and informative site gets good Search Engine Love and rank better than their non-optimized counterparts. So what exactly is a Well Optimized site and what is On Page Optimization?

On Page Optimization includes following parameters that you need to check:

1) Optimized Design and Coding

2) Well Optimized and Unique Content

3) SEO-Optimized Meta Tags

4) Strong Interlinking Structure

This was an overview of what we are going to learn about On Page Optimization in following SEO guide through a detailed explanation of every step.

A well designed and coded website is a great experience for Users as well as Search Engines. Designing a SEO friendly site will need you to take care of some important tips. Here is a quick check list that you must go through to decide if your site is SEO friendly or not.

1) Site must contains all necessary SEO HTML Tags like Title, Description, Header (H1), Alt tags (in images) etc.

2) Page Size must not be more than 150 KB. Although bigger pages get indexed by Search Engines but their load time will be higher resulting in to bad user experience.

3) Static Site URL's, even if you are using dynamic URL's; parameters in those URL's must not be more than 2.

4) URL depth of any page on your site must not be more than 4. Instead of using http://www.yoursite.com/online/tickets/cheapflights/airlines/british-aiways.html use something like http://www.yoursite.com/airlines/british-airways.html

5) Remove all canonical issues from your site. Canonical URL's are referred to a condition when more than one URL direct to same page e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/, http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com/index.html etc. The best way is to redirect all URL's to a single and most important one.

6) Use of Frames or Login Pages restricts the access of Spiders (Search Engine Crawlers) on web page thus avoiding indexing of pages. So don't use these techniques on pages you need to get indexed in Search Engine database.

7) Site must have a proper XML as well as HTML sitemap.

8) A proper and well defined navigation structure.

9) Site must not have broken links.

10) No junk codes on web page. All CSS or big Java Scripts must be called from outside.

11) Don't use excessive Flash or Ajax on Webpage.

12) Use Alt Tags on Images. Use your most important keywords as Alt Tag. Save images in your site's image folder with the name that actually describes the image.

Content is always considered as the most important parameter when deciding the importance of a web page over the internet. Unique, informative and well optimized content is always helpful in getting good rankings. A golden rule of Internet Marketing is: Provide Value to the Web and Get High Returns.

There are some concepts like Keyword Density, Keyword Prominence and Keyword Proximity that copywriters must take care of while writing content, but the most important is to "Write for Users not for Search Engines". However taking a middle approach is best strategy.

Keyword Density, Keyword Proximity, Keyword Prominence:

Before writing content decide the focus of web page. Don't try to focus on too many keywords on a single page. Select 1 or 2 most valuable keywords for a page and then find out at least 10 phrases out of these primary keywords. Data collected at Keyword Research step will be helpful in this.

Keyword Density: Keyword Density for a particular keyword is referred to the ratio of keyword appearing in content to the total number of words in the page. Ideal keyword density is 4% to 5%, however as I said earlier that writing for users is best and focusing too much on keyword density is not much beneficial. Many SEO claims that Keyword Density is totally useless in terms of Search Engine Optimization and writing for users only is important, but I suggest to have balance between the two.

Keyword Prominence: It is referred to the position of major keywords on a web page. The more prominent (appearing early) the keyword is; more attention it will grab of Search Engines. It is a good strategy to put main keyword to the start of web page. Thus it is recommended to place keyword on page title, description, alt image on logo, header and in the first 2 lines of web page.

Keyword Proximity: It is the closeness between two or more keywords. Closer the keywords are; better results you can expect. One thing to mention here is; that your keywords must be dispersed equally on your web page. Don't spam the page by placing all the keyword in one paragraph and then nowhere on web page.

Although a unique, informative and properly SEO optimized content is best to feed crawlers, but presenting the content in a way such that it appeals the end users if more important. Following things must be taken care of for a good user experience and to gain maximum benefit from your content:

1) Use a proper font and font size that are easy on eye and can be read without any difficulty.

2) Use small paragraphs or points to split your whole content into small readable snippets.

3) Content length must be at least 250 to 300 words. However if you can manage some lengthy article then it is best, but it must not be done at the price of quality.

4) Know your audience first and then write targeting the potential users.

5) Give more emphasis to your primary keywords by adding bold tag to them, but don't overdo it. Do the same with any important points you want to highlight. Using underlines, italics and quotes is also some of the best practices to increases readability.

These small points will increase the usefulness of your web page and users will be interested to read what's there on your page.

It is a common practice to include your primary keywords in content to optimize your content. Sometimes in order to maintain the higher keyword density webmasters try to spam the Search Engines by repeating their major keyword again and again. To combat the spam search engines especially Google use a method called LSI (Latest Semantic Indexing) while retrieving the web page. LSI was first incorporated in ranking system of Google in 2006.

LSI is a concept where Search Engines not only focus on keywords used on the page but they also find the related words and phrases to the primary keyword of web page.

Thus it is advised not to run behind that prescribed keyword density and be natural by taking benefit of LSI. For this you must not only repeat your keywords throughout the page but all related word and phrases on the page. In other words you should mix up your keywords and other phrases that can be closely correlated with your keyword on the page to get better search engine results.

Precaution: The above written concept of LSI is just a basic interpretation of this algorithm. Actually it is a much complex concept that you must understand. For further reading here are some links that describes LSI in a much deeper details:

http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-indexing-lsi-explained.php