The root goal of a search engine optimization strategy will ultimately be to generate targeted traffic and monetize that traffic through the use of organic search. This can be done via on-page and off-page search engine optimization, the use of videos, images, and a constantly updated informative blog. As more content and products are created, newly optimized pages can be created to house that content and those products.

Stage 1: Infancy

The very first thing in our strategy is keyword research. Using popular and effective keywords on your website will help to assure that it will be visible in the search engine results instead of being buried under thousands of other websites in the search results. In order to gain a better understanding for how potential customers will find our website, we look at what keywords are related to our product/service, and try to decipher which ones have the highest number of searches. We use Google as a tool to do our keyword research because Google holds a very large percentage of searchers in comparison to other engines.

Once we’ve done some extensive keyword research, we now know what to use in our title tags, image’s ALT tags, meta data, as well as what to name our files. When deciding what keywords to use where, one thing that must be kept in mind is relevancy. We want to rank for our keywords, but we do not want to over-use them, or use them in an irrelevant fashion. By understanding what keywords we are trying to rank for, we now have a decent idea of what types of content our potential visitors are searching for. This leads us to the next stage in our website business plan.

Stage 2: Design and Implementation

It’s good to understand design and seo implementaion before you start your site. That way, instead of updating an existing site for search engine optimization, your site will be created from the ground up with search engine optimization as a priority. Your site potentially could have easily become a flash website, but instead will become a XHTML/CSS based site. All your web pages will contain 100% unique content, and will target different keywords. Visuals should be kept relatively simple, although hopefully aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Every link needs to have been carefully placed with intended anchor text and destinations. Every image should be tagged and every bit of information should go through a personally conducted “relevancy test”.

Stage 3: Traffic Driving

Every aspect of search engine optimization boils down to a methodology to obtain more traffic from search engines. Traffic can be converted into money, and we want traffic! We have developed a checklist of operation to complete after your site goes live. You don’t have to do every little thing, but you should consider most of them.

• Site will be submitted to the major search engines.

• A press release will be submitted.

• Video content will be submitted to Youtube and various other video sites.

• Industry related articles will be written and submitted to EzineArticles and GoArticles, as well and any additional article services that are found to be credible.

• Small-scale testing will begin with pay-per-click campaigns.

• Multiple social networks will be explored, with a link back to our site in each profile.

• Questions will be answered on message boards with links to relevant information our website provides in the form of tutorials.

• Images will be submitted to image-based search engines.

• Website will be submitted to relevant Google Directory listings.

Stage 4: Ongoing Maintenance

We’ve come up with a weekly regimen that will help both build traffic over time, and keep the site maintained:

• Write and submit one article.

• Make 1-2 Forum postings containing a informative post and a relevant link back to your website.

• A new blog post will be posted or new page created on your website.

• A request will be sent to another reputable and relevant website for a one-way link.

Conclusion

With the help of search engine optimization, quality content, constant updating, and the viral nature of video, your site could take it’s first successful step within your search engine optimization strategy. This year, your website could be on the correct path to generating many potential customers and a working business model.

After you have completed your keyword selection process, the next step is to create a keywords and domains. If you are trying to rank for a keyword “marketing strategies” for example, you’re goal at this point would be to try and get marketingstrategies.com or something closely similar. This can be another time consuming task, but at this point in your strategy you should have completed your keyword selection and that is a huge milestone in itself.

This blog is a perfect example here. Most likely you’ve found my blog by searching for an “seo blog”, and I have both of those keywords in my domain name.. Now this isn’t entirely neccesary but it does help a great deal when trying to rank for particular keyword phrases in google.

Give this part of your process some deep thought, and even when you’ve decided on your new domain name, sleep on it. Re-investigate your domain choices the next day along with some new ones. Eventually you will settle on keywords and domains that you also think is (hopefully) tasteful.

This article will conclude the section covering market research, although more tools will be added as time progresses. The next step after your market research is done would be search engine optimization, this is where all of this research we’ve been doing will start to come together and hopefully achieve our goals as internet marketers.

Keywords, you are probably familiar with the term, but do you know what It really means? In this article we will attempt to explore many different ways of doing suing a keyword search tool. A few new tools will be introduced along with some new schools of thought.

Let us begin with a bit of keyword theory. Keywords are phrases that people type into a search engine when they are looking for something. Keywords can also be thought of as audiences or markets. We can use the Google Keyword Tool to input phrases, and Google will return some results for us.

We need to go through a couple iterations of searching here. Lets pretend we are developing a new website about market research (imagine that). Market research is a very broad topic, and based on the huge amount of google results for that keyword we can assume that it is a very competitive keyword as well. Let us type this keyword into the Google Keyword Tool and we will find some “deeper” results. For instance, we might find a newer, more specific keyword, “market research strategies”. This keyword while getting less traffic, also has less competition. That would make a candidate for our website.

Let’s look at some numbers now, some guidelines if you will.

When using Google’s keyword search tool I tend to look for specific keyphrases that get at least 100 searches a day, and less than 50,000 results in google. By targeting these keywords we can assume we will be able to rank and retrieve those daily visitors in a shorter amount of time. 100 visitors a day is not a great value, but we are not stopping at this keyword. The goal is to find as many specific keywords as we can that matches our criteria, and eventually create seperate pages for each of those keywords on our website.

Another tool you can use for keyword selection is Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Update: I believe that wordtracker is becoming less reliable. I would focus on Google’s Keyword Tool, or the tools in our tools section.

Something else to note is that when you are searching for your keywords in google to find out the amount of competition, you should be placing the keywords in quotes. This is called a phrase match. Pages that rank well for a phrase match will automatically begin to rank higher for broad match (no quotes) versions of the same keyword.

Is there someone out there already making a dollar doing exactly what it is you are trying to do? Welcome to the companies analysis portion of our site. Here we will reveal a few tools that will aid you in researching your competitions traffic, demographics, keywords, paid advertising, backlinks, pagerank, whoa! Wait a minute! We can tell all of these things about our competition? You bet.

Note:

None of these services should be trusted in there entirety. In most cases they are fairly accurate but there is no absolute gauruntee.  You should instead study your competition on each of these tools and find a common ground.

Second Note:

Before you decide who you will include in your companies analysis, you need to make sure (using the following tools) that they do indeed have a decent amount of traffic to their site.

Compete.com
Compete is a pretty useful tool. You can compare up to three websites with a graph on Compete. This graph will show the amount of monthly visitors to each of the input sites, relevant to one another. This is great because we can see who is getting the most traffic easily.  Compete will also give you a list of keywords in which the website is getting search engine traffic for.

SEMRush.com
SEMRush is almost indentical to compete in the way it functions, the difference being in the data, and that SEMRush delivers its results in a table format rather than a graph. SEMRush is a valuable tool still however.

SpyFu.com
This is a very interesting tool that allows you to review what keywords your competitors are PAYING for. These keywords are not always high traffic keywords, in fact, more often than not they are fairly low traffic. What makes up for the low traffic is that the advertiser usually just has more ads stretched across more keywords. These keywords are usually longer than most and more targeted and specific. Because of this, the PAID keywords are often higher converting.

Quantcast.com
Quantcast provides probably the most unique tool for your companies analysis, demographics. Quantcast will retrieve data (usually only from relatively high traffic sites) that contains visitors demographic variables like age, gender, race, income, education, and more. Quantcast will even tell you what percentage of people that go to a site searched for a particular keyword. This is priceless.

With these tools you can most likely get lost for days, but try and keep focused and take some quality notes. We’ll see you next in “Keyword Selection”.