SEO Pro of Sacramento

5:30am Get up and turn on the computer. Grab a cup of joe while it downloads my emails. A SEO business is never closed, even though I checked my email last night at 2:00am, there are still over 30 new ones (not including spam!) - mostly from customers.
So I spend the next hour replying to emails and deleting spam.

6:30am With the emails done, I make a start on the real work of the day - linking. I am currently on a linking project for a customers site. The ease is there but I am just ironing out some of the ‘behind the bid’ issues. The key to a good SEO Pro is to have everything ready automatically so that customers don’t have to wait and the site owner doesn’t have to deal with every single transaction that takes place.

Continue reading A Day in the Life of an SEO Pro…

You may be wondering why it’s so important to learn HTML when there are tools that will do it all for you. I know I was. The following reasons say it all:
If you rely on a Web development tool to write your HTML for you, you only know as much about HTML as your tool does. When new features and versions of the HTML language come out, you won’t be able to use them without upgrading your tool.

Continue reading The importance of learning HTML…

Relevance is a central concept in search engine marketing, but you will be hard pressed to find any reasonable definition for it. Most SEO Pros take the term for granted, and the rest of us just nod along. It is not very complicated, but it does involve some very core ideas, so listen closely.

In SEO, relevance is a criteria used by search engines to determine the importance of a target (page, keyword, website) within a niche. Since search engines are primarily concerned with serving user queries, the role of relevance comes up most often during searches. For example, if I search for the term search marketing on Google, the search engine will analyse its index and provide me a list of web pages ranked by how relevant they are to search marketing? in this case the top result is www.overture.com, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Continue reading What is relevance in SEO…

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is made up of several factors and executing these correctly is vital to your sites performance. The golden rule is simple: Build the site for your VISITORS and NOT to try and “trick” the search engines. This is the single most important rule of SEO. I will discuss the 3 key areas of On Page SEO.
Continue reading Build Your Site Correctly…

The internet is full of businesses that design their web sites first and then research their target markets second. Imagine spending all thattime to develop a business only to find out the need for yourproduct was a) not as big as you thought or b) you were targeting the wrong keywords for your site right from the start. Now you are left with having to spend additional time and resources to redesign your site and target it correctly.

This can all be avoided by taking 15 minutes to research your target market before starting the design phase. The old saying “Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance” was made for a reason! Research the best keywords for your site to target!!

I cannot stress this enough as in my opinion it is the first step to success. I do not build businesses purely because I enjoy doing so. I build businesses because I enjoy making money. I enjoy being at the top of my target market and I enjoy seeing my sites outrank the competition and I enjoy being rewarded for this work. You no doubt have a few keywords or phrases in mind you would like to rank for. These keywords make sense to you, and are probably the words or phrases you would type into a search engine when looking for your product. Are they the words MOST people would use to find your product however? Let’s find out.
I am going to take a real life example of keyword research so that you may follow along. This is the exact process I use and best of all; the research tools are free. Let’s say for arguments sake I would like to put up a site about dog breeders.

I have an idea of which dogs would be the most popular in terms of search requests but I am not 100% sure – I can’t base a business on this now can I?! Without going to the search engine tools I am going to guess that Golden Retrievers are the most requested. My logic tells me that they are great family dogs and let’s face it; we see plenty of them around the neighborhoods and dog parks etc. So off to the Overture suggestion tool I go to get a variety of dog breeds for further research.

I type in the word “breeder” to get a very wide range of related keyword requests. The list of most requested dog breeders looks like this according to Overture: (March 2005)

1. German Shepherd

2. Siberian Husky

3. French Bulldog

4. Basset Hound

5. Miniature Pincher

The Golden Retriever breeds ranked around 15 – 20. I do not take this tool as fact however and am merely using it to get a variety of keywords to do more research on.

In my experience I have found Overtures results to be a little “off”. This can be due to a variety of reasons which we can discuss in the forums at greater length. Overture does however give me a good idea of the various associated keywords and number of requests. For further information I will take the breeds above (and a few others) and enter them into the Google Adwords tool which again is free. (Simply sign up for a free account) This tool is based on their search engine requests and gives you a very good idea how many visitors you would receive to your site per day if you were running a pay per click campaign with them.

Of course I merely use the tool to get an idea of expected traffic. In my experience you will get 50% more traffic than they estimate as organic listings receive more traffic than paid listings. The top 3 dog breed requests per Google are as follows:

1. German Shepherd Breeders 4.5 visitors per day

2. Golden Retriever Breeders 4.3 visitors per day

3. Siberian Husky Breeders 2.6 visitors per day

As you can see I was wrong, the German Shepherd Breed is the most requested. I now have concrete evidence to base my business on. Should you need additional data you can use the Wordtracker Tool which has a free demo which is good enough for most users.

Summary: Use Overture to get related keywords to your industry and then research those keywords on Google and Wordtracker for more accurate traffic expectations. Keep in mind that user trends change over time, what is highly requested today may not be so in 3 months time.

Free Research Tools:

Overture Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

Word Tracker http://www.wordtracker.com

Google Adwords http://adwords.google.com

Analyzing Your Competition Find out what they don’t want you to! So you have your target keywords, now what? You need to analyze your competition! You would not go up against Microsoft if you did not have the right weapons to compete with them now would you?

The same philosophy applies to search engine rankings. Analyzing your competition is the easy part. Type your target keywords into Yahoo or Google to get a complete list of the top ranking sites. The next step is to find out how they managed to get those top rankings.

Go to PostTrades.com At the top right of the page you will see a field where you can enter the web site address of one of your competitors. You will be presented with a complete summary of their site pertaining to backlinks, number of pages and directory listings.

The important fields are the following:

1. Unique linking domains

2. Pages indexed You now need to decide whether or not you can get more unique relevant domains to link to your site than your competition. It is easy enough to set up a site with lots of content and even lots of fresh content. The real trick is getting all those juicy backlinks the search engines love. We will discuss this in greater detail in Step 4.

Summary: You have learnt the two most important factors of pre-site preparation:

1. How to find your target keywords

2. What it will take to beat your competition

This is vital information and failure to do proper research will more often than not result in your business closing before it ever starts. There is a reason over 85% of internet businesses fail – Poor Research & Execution. Follow my basic principles and there is no reason why you too can’t share in the vast wealth the internet CAN deliver!