7 SEO Steps to Top Ranking

1. Keyword Research

• Most important step in the process
• Develop a strategy to generate relevant keywords
• Validate your word and phrase selection with Word Tracker
• Use available tools (www.sitesolutions.com)
• Start very generic
• Only optimize for sites that are applicable and worth your time and effort

2. Competition Research

• Find out what the competition is doing online
• Go over their pages and see what they are doing right
• Exploit their weaknesses and create opportunities for your clients

3. Create Keyword Rich Content

• Copy content is critical to the effectiveness of SEO
• A reasonable estimate is at least 250 words on each page
• Write for your visitors. If the copy makes sense to visitors it makes sense to search engines
• Don’t use graphical headlines
• Use different variations of words on different pages e.g. “web site” vs. “website”

4. Develop the Actual Strategies for the Site Development

• Most clients will not sacrifice aesthetics for positioning
• Search Engines like basic HTML, keyword rich content in their design
• Search Engines cannot read Flash, Java, and other Advanced technologies
• They also penalize frames, tables, intensive graphics, etc.
• If your client uses these, you will likely have to use a workaround like Doorway pages or Gateway Information Pages (GIPS)

5. Submit Sites Manually to Search Engines/Directories

• Don’t rely on automated software. Search Engines have spam trappers for these
• Pay attention to how often and how many you submit
• Pay attention to which engines will allow you to submit more than one page per site

6. Monthly Monitoring

Monitor your results by periodically searching they keywords (you optimized the site with) in Search Engines and/or directories to view results. You can also see how the keywords are working within Urchin by viewing traffic numbers, keywords, and which bots/crawlers visited your site from different Search Engines.

7. Create a Strategy to Generate Link Popularity

• What is Link Popularity?

– It measures the quantity and quality of in-bound links to your web pages

• Why is it important?

– The major search engines use it in their algorithms to rank a site

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