However I am not here to tell you what is the best working environment for you. I have compiled a list of quick and basic tips for those just starting out in the SEO world.

Read & Stay Up to Date

There is nothing being behind in the SEO world. Did you know that 301 redirects don’t pass full PageRank? Did you know there was a toolbar PageRank update two days ago? If you weren’t aware of these things you need to read more, keep up to date in the dynamic world of SEO! I am by no means saying that I am a guru when it comes to the latest SEO theories and updates, but I do my best to keep ahead of the trend.

As a youngster in SEO, you must keep ahead of the pack, as the pack has more experience than you. Most of the guru’s out there have been plying their trade for 5 or more years (many SEO’s have upwards of 10-12 years experience!), so it’s crucial you partially make up for this inexperience by being on the ball when it comes to changes in Google’s algorithm, linkbait theories etc.

Here are a few RSS feeds I suggest following:

• SEOmoz
• Google Webmaster Central
• Michael Gray
• Matt Cutts

If you see any others that provide really valuable content, be sure to subscribe to their RSS feed, just in case you miss them in your daily browsing.

Get Your Name Out There

This is a point that I myself am still working on, so I can’t give you definitive answers. However I can try and point you in the right direction, and let you know a few things I am trying.

Start a Blog

This allows you to publish your thoughts in full, without too much outside interference. It gives others a point of reference, and allows them to get an insight into what kind of internet marketer you are.

Get on Twitter

I know many of you will already be on Twitter, but if you aren’t, do it. Worst case scenario, you get a handful of followers, but at least it gives you a point of reference for your favourite links! Be sure not to post too reguarly, or too infrequently, and only post about things you are genuinely interested in. For more information check out my post on Using Twitter for SEO.

I was having a chat to a social media specialist today, and she said that Twitter was predominantly a “follow/unfollow” game. So spend some time once a week following people in your industry who you think will post valuable content, then also spend some time unfollowing people that aren’t following you. So by following others, your number of followers should increase in turn.

Twitter drives great traffic for any links you post, so if you couple this with starting a blog, the results can come in quickly.

Audit Your Facebook Profile

This point goes not only for your Facebook profile, but any websites that may have publicly accessible information about yourself.

Now I can’t stress this enough. Make sure the information is clean! Don’t join groups which may be offensive, try to keep wall post’s above-board, and don’t post photos of you after a huge Saturday night out. Also it’s worth making sure all your Facebook profile is set to private.

Now I know this shouldn’t have to be a worry, and it annoys me that this is an issue, but believe me in the internet marketing industry people will Google your name. So it’s worth cleaning up anything out there that could be perceived as in bad taste. You have been warned!

Expand Your Knowledge

Unfortunately we can’t all specialise in everything. But what I can recommend is working out where your knowledge is lacking or could be improved and start trying to increase your knowledge on that subject. For me it was PHP and CSS, so I sat down with a couple of designers, and had a look over some websites just to get up to a basic level of understanding.

For you it might be CRO, or HTML, or design, but whatever it is, be sure to spend some time on improving those skills. It can be so easy trying to fine tune the skill-set you specialise in, that it is easy to move away from the big picture. Even though you might not be hands-on in these areas of internet marketing, having an understanding of them will help ensure your success as an internet marketer.

I’m a huge fan of videos, because at worst at least you are increasing brand awareness, credibility, and hopefully some direct traffic. On this note, it’s worth having a watermark over the video for those few people which type web address’ directly into their browsers.

Video for Linkbait

Can you think of a good article that you think people would be enticed to link to? Why not try making an interesting video instead? The video first caught on as a good SEO, linkbait, marketing tactic when a few people began releasing very interesting/funny/infromative videos and noticed they spread across the web incredibly quickly. We now know this phenamonom as a video going “viral”. If you happen to host an interesting/funny/informative video on your website, or a page within your site, you will find it draws an incredible amount of links!

Video for Direct Links

Created a video that’s hosted on your website? You can pump it out to a few different video sharing websites and get some DIRECT links in return. Here is a handy list of 12 do-follow video sharing websites. Don’t simply limit your submissions to video sharing websites with “dofollow” links. Make sure you submit to YouTube and other major video submission website to ensure your link profile is kept relatively natural, and as Google’ postition on nofollow links seems to change day-to-day it can’t hurt to have a few nofollow links!

SEO for Video

Want to get your video at appear at the top of the YouTube SERP’s or even Google results? Then you will have to embark on some SEO for your video. Essentially SEO for video follows the same conventions as SEO for standard websites. Try and get some links to your video on YouTube (be sure to link to it from your website). Google and YouTube also seem to take into account the number of views a video has, so try to optimise your video for highly searched terms. Here is a little tip if you are struggling. Find a video in your niche that has a large number of views, then copy that video’s ‘tags’ exactly and you should appear very highly in “Related Videos”. Don’t be afraid to respond to somebody else’s video as well, as this is also a good way to piggyback of somebody else’s success.

As always, leave a comment.

Linkbuilding, whether we like it or not, is hugely important in SEO. Links are what set Google apart from the rest of the search engine crowd, and what makes them the multi-billion dollar company they are today. Back in September, 1998, two young men thought that websites should be judged by the number and type of external links a website had pointed at it, as opposed to solely focusing on on-site features.

One of the most difficult parts of linkbuilding is deciding what a given link is “worth”. Not so long ago, we relied solely on Google PageRank as it appeared in the toolbar. This is not a terrible way of deciding how much a link might be worth, as PR is in some representative of how influential a website is (as PR is based mostly on the amount and type of incoming links to a site). However, just getting a link from a PR 6 website might not be worth what you think it is. As toolbar PageRank is only updated approximately every 3 months (sometimes more like 4 or 5 months), it is impossible to say what a site’s PR is at any given moment. Matt Cutts’ has confirmed that PageRank is a dynamic quantity, and is actually changing day to day.

So can you use PR as a measurement for working out the value of a link? You can to a point. Check out the following table to work out how much a link from different levels of PR is worth…

As you can see, as a general rule PR is worth 5.5 times as much for every level you go up.

When Google crawls a page and analyses all the data and content on a page, it uses something called latent semantic indexing (LMS). LMS does something that I don’t understand, but I’ll give it a shot! LMS, while still being a Google “robot”, tries to analyse a page in an almost human-esque fashion. LMS allows Google to see if a link is placed around other links, in related content, in content that bares no relation at all, in a footer etc. LMS can be your best friend or worst enemy. LMS can often tell if your link is natural and genuine, or part of a reciprocal link exchange or a bought link.

In saying all of the above, valuing a link is mainly about using common sense. Follow some of these pointers:

• Make sure that any link you are getting is related to the page that it will be pointing to (if not, the link may be worth less than nothing at all!)
• Avoid link farms. You can spot these as they will be pages that just contain a number of links with no useful content.
  • (Google can spot link farms a mile away now. Don’t risk it!)
• Avoid reciprocal link exchanges where possible.
  • At worst, try 3-way link exchanges

As always, I would love some comments, so let me know what you think!

Many posts and updates to come!

Try to Avoid <div> Tags

<div> tags are essentially meaningless tags that need to be defined by the editor. While they do have some use it is much easier and more SEO-friendly to use <h1>, <h2> etc. tags.

Use Header Tags Properly <h#>

By utilising header tags in the correct places you can show Google what are the important aspects of each page. For example, if your page is about “HTML Markup” use the following HTML towards the top of your page (wherever it should appear naturally) <h1>HTML Markup</h1>. This then shows the search engines that this is the main theme of your page. The <h1> tag should be kept quite similar to the page’s <title> tag.

If your page needs sub-headings, be sure to use the <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags.

Utilise the Right Tags

Use tags like <strong> and <em> instead of, <b> and <i>, as the search engines interpret these tags better.

When forming a list, don’t simply add text with a <br> tag between each line. Add a proper ordered or unordered list. <ul> for unordered, and <il> for ordered.

Image HTML

A little known HTML fact is the importance of optimising your images for the search engines. Google uses images and the HTML surrounding an image to determine if the image matches what they believe the theme of the website is. Make sure you enter “alt” text in your image with your keyword. This is a good way to markup the HTML for your images:

<img src=”http://domain.com/image.html” alt=“these are the keywords I’m targeting” />

Be careful though, as Google will know when you are cheating! For example, if you optimise and image of a dog and use the alt text “cat”, Google will throw that image in the Google Image Search Results for “cat”. If it gets no clicks, Google will know it”s not an image of a cat and punish you.

Site Speed

Matt Cut’s recently announced at PubCon that site speed would be a huge SEO factor in 2010. So if you are running a slow (possibly flash-based) website, expect to be punished in the SERP’s in the next 12 months.

Here is a quick video by Google with some tips on improving your page speed. Also be sure to check out their website www.code.google.com/speed

As always, be sure to let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

Why post this on an SEO blog you ask? I may be shooting myself in the foot here, but sometimes traffic isn’t the issue, it’s saleability. Many SEO professionals can increase your traffic 10,000%, but will it increase sales?

Take a look at your current sale rate. Is it at what you think is a reasonable level? Anywhere between 0.5%-8% are good benchmark figures, with 1%-2% being good levels for a financial website for example, whereas retail websites can go as high as an 8% conversion rate. If you are somewhere in this conversion rate (5%-8% for retail, and slightly lower for most other services), then SEO is what you should be focusing on.

However, if have a conversion rate of 2% or lower, then maybe your first port of call should be optimising for conversion, not for traffic levels.

I am no conversion expert, but I have done some work with it in the past, and here are a few tips to help increase your conversion rate (yes, most of them are just common sense but remember a conversion is a different thing for each site, sometimes a conversion is simply a phone call, these are just simple points that should work on every website).

Direct the User

Don’t let the user aimlessly stumble about your website. Try to direct them to sales pages in the least clicks possible. Ideally you should be able to make a sale on the first page they land on.  Have “Buy Now” buttons spread out so that one is always visible on the browser (but try and do it in a neat, attractive way).

Attractive Yet Simple

Having an attractive site is important. Think about when you buy something from a retail store, the look and feel of the store determines how much you are willing to pay, what you expect to find, how long you spend there etc. A website is no different.  Make your website an inviting space for users where they can linger.

As with everything I seem to write there is a ‘but’. In this case it involves ensuring your website is attractive, while still maintaining it’s ease-of-use. Don’t overuse Flash or annoying animations, and make sure your images aren’t so large that they increase loading times substantially. Avoid clutter and superfluous information/images/text as this simply distracts the user from what they should be doing, buying!

Alter Your Pricing, Payment Options

By offering a range of payment and pricing options, you are making your product readily accessible to more markets. Not everybody has a credit card, not everybody trusts direct debit. Make sure you use PayPal as one of the options, as this tends to be one of the safest options for both you the seller and the buyer. Buyers tend to trust PayPal more than standard payment options.

Offer a Guarantee

By offering a guarantee of some sort, money-back is the most common, you can prove to the customer that you are so confident in your product you can guarantee they will be satisfied with it. How can they lose then? If they love your product (which they should) they simply completed the transaction that was expected, and if not they haven’t lost anything.

Be Open, Honest and Trustworthy

Don’t try and hide anything, or put extra charges behind a wall of tiny text and Terms and Conditions. Make the charges transparent, so the buyer isn’t hit with extra charges at the last minute (as there is no surer way of blowing a sale). If you have extra credit card charges, shipping costs etc, make sure the buyer knows about it early on.

Post some testimonials of happy buyers in the past, show that you are posting by courier and give them the reference number, give realistic time frames for delivery, anything to reassure the buyer.

I know these are all relatively obvious points, but I have used them all in the past to up the conversion rate of a number of sites. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or disagreements please comment!

While traffic for certain small businesses from the SERP’s may be small, conversion rates tend to be quite a bit higher than for more highly traffic keywords. For example, people searching for “hair salon Lane Cove” more than likely are looking for a hair salon where then can get a haircut sooner rather than later.

Select Your Keywords Carefully

The keywords you choose to optimise for are very important for small business. Generally, the users searching for more niche search terms are searching for very specific sites, and even if you rank for the term you will more than likely be skipped as users search for the specific results.

Brainstorm what you would search for if you were a prospective client searching for your business. For Green’s on Blenheim some keywords might be:

• “Green’s on Blenheim”
• “pizza North Ryde”
• “pizza Ryde”
• “North Ryde takeaway”

Your list should be longer than this. Once you have completed your list have a look at what ranks at the moment. Do they obviously use SEO? What are their titles? Where do they get their links from? Don’t forget to use Google’s Keyword Tool to find some good keywords…

I would recommend trying to rank for industry and geographic location (i.e. “pizza North Ryde” or “plumber Dubbo”), as this would result in a high level of conversions.

Keep the On-Site SEO Simple and Targetted

Obviously, as a business website, your site’s content can’t be 100% customised for SEO purposes. This need not affect rankings, since Google rewards totally unique content (which yours should be!)

• Make sure you have the main keywords in your titles once
  • Do this for each page of your website so they all rank
• Ensure your site is easy to navigate
  • Have a simple HTML navigation structure that is easy to use for users and for search engine spiders
• Don’t be too fancy
  • Google can’t read Flash (for now), so best to keep to HTML as that is the best for SEO

Customise Your Off-Site

I would never deny the importance of links in SEO, but for small business SEO it is a lot more efficient and effective to customise your link gathering. Generally, competition will be lower for the keywords you have selected, thus a wide-ranging and all-encompassing link building campaign, while it may have it’s benefits, will be superfluous. Here’s a few tips for good off-site small business optimisation:

• Submit to all the relevant directories
  • Yahoo Local and Google Local are perfect examples. A submission to Google Local can often result in an appearance above the search results in Google.
  • Submit to industry relevant directories

• Try to gather links from sites that would genuinely link to you. That might be clients, suppliers, or even competition!
• Create and submit a Google sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
• Would it be worth creating a Twitter or Facebook account for your business? Often the answer is ‘no’, but if you think you have something interesting and relevant to share of actual value then this is a great way of gathering links and increasing profile.

Tracking and Maintenance

As I said in earlier posts, the importance of using Google Analytics effectively cannot be stressed enough. By monitoring traffic flow daily, and finding where it came from will allow you to fine-tune your SEO over time.

Also monitor how your site goes in the SERP’s. Track the results weekly to see what you begin to rank for, and what is dragging the chain. This way you will learn what deserve attention and focus, and what can be left by the wayside.

Admittedly, any link posted on Twitter appears as “nofollow” and thus isn’t much good for passing any link juice or PageRank. However, we do know that Google still crawls “nofollow” links (doesn’t make much sense, does it) and so your links will still get followed and thus any updates you make to your website will get cached quicker. The main benefit is not SEO though, it is to drive direct traffic and increase credibility.

It would also seem that Google has an infatuation with Twitter, and Tweets tend to show up reasonably quickly in the SERP’s. There are a few tips when using Twitter that may help you out if you are Tweeting for SEO purposes:

Pick a Good Username

Your username will also become your Twitter URL (i.e. www.Twitter.com/mjwtaylor) so try and make it either something to do with your name or your business name. This will help your rankings in Google and ensure people know exactly what they have found when they come across your account. It will also ensure your account is found easily when searched for through Twitter itself.

Write an Effective Bio

Ensure you put in any critical information, keywords or key phrases in your bio as this is the most important part of your Twitter account and will be the core content Google sees.  It also tells the reader what you are about and what they can expect to find in your Tweets.

Tweet About Things That Interest You

This might seem obvious, but make sure you don’t just Tweet about your website. Otherwise people won’t see any value in your Tweets. Sure if you have something on your site you want to promote, then post about it, but make sure you post about other things as well.

Tweet Regularly, but Not Too Regularly

Don’t overdo your Tweets. People will lose interest if you are Tweeting dozens of times everyday.  At the same time, people will forget about you if you only post once a month. I like posting once a day or so, but in saying that, if you have something interesting to share then by all means share it!

Begin Your Tweet with Keywords

Google tends to take into account approximately the first 40 characters from a Tweet for SEO purposes (as it also shows “Twitter” and your username before showing the tweet itself, so don’t have a stupidly long username!). Make sure in this 42 characters you have included the keyword or key phrase (but in a way that makes sense).

Include Your Keyword

Be sure to include your keyword at least once in your Tweet, preferably more but not in a spammy way. Try to include “buzz words” if possible, which should get you some traffic through people searching for the “buzz” terms.

Shorten Your URL!

Most links from Twitter tend to be deep links which have a huge amount of characters in them. You don’t have the characters to waste in Twitter, so try using one of the many URL shorteners out there. My preference is a new service called Twilitics. It’s simple, easy to use and provides you with a simple tracking mechanism showing how many times your link has been clicked. Bit.ly is also a useful service.

Spread the Word

Make sure people know about your Twitter account. You can do this by adding your Twitter URL to your email signature, adding it to your website, or spreading it on your forum signatures.

Give it Some Link Love

Twitter accounts need link love too! Where possible send a couple of links pointing to your Twitter account to ensure Google finds it. The same theory applies to Twitter accounts as it does to normal websites: the better the quality of links you get to it, the better it will rank…

As always, if you have any questions leave me a comment and the same goes for if you think I have left out something important.

Changing URL Structure

This is one of the  easiest and most effective SEO changes you can make in WordPress. To make your subpages appear with the best URL structure (check out my Basic SEO Tips for URL structure tips), you will need to change the permalinks.  To do this navigate to your WordPress dashboard, click “Settings”, then “Permalinks”. You will then want to select “Custom Structure” and insert “/%postname%/” in the text box (minus the inverted commas). This then makes the URL blog.com/the-post-name.

Easy Titles, Descriptions etc.

As I said in a previous post, your websites title is arguably the most important SEO feature of the whole site. The description on the other hand has now tangible SEO benefit, but will certainly help drive traffic as a good description will entice searchers to check your site out.  This  can be managed incredibly easily on WordPress by installing a plugin called “All-in-One SEO” (just search for that in “Plugins”). This let’s you manage lots of things that would otherwise be difficult to access on a WordPress site…

Add a Google Sitemap

Since it’s so easy to add posts and pages to a WordPress site, you often end up with an endless labyrinth of subpages and directories which are almost impossible for the search engines to crawl.  By adding an XML sitemap and submitting this to Google, it ensures all your pages get crawled and begin ranking. The easiest way to do this is by getting the “XML-Sitemap” plugin for WordPress which creates a sitemap automatically and submits it to the search engines. It is also worth signing up for Google’s Webmaster Tools to track your site’s sitemap and check which of your pages have been crawled etc.

Internal Linking

As I mentioned previously, your WordPress site will no doubt end up with a heap of pages on it after only a couple of months.  This means there should be ample opportunity to link one post to another (like I have done in this post).  Be sure to use solid anchor text, preferably the page’s title or the keyword you are targeting (ideally these would be one and the same).

Tracking

Since Google Analytic’s can be a bit difficult to install properly on WordPress (give it a go though, as it is well worth it) you may have to look elsewhere for tracking software. A favourite of mine is the “Wassup” plugin (just search for it in “Plugins” and click “Install”). It is very Analytics-esque, and will show you exactly what people searched for to find your site or who referred them. By having this information it allows you to show what posts are the most visited and what is worth posting about more often.

If I have missed anything out or you want to add something please leave me a comment!

Google Keyword Tool

Absolutely invaluable to identify the niche’s you are targeting.  Work out the competitiveness of a certain keyword, the number of searches per month, and other keywords worth focusing on.  Be sure to set the search to Australia only, and when working out how many searches a certain keyword get’s, select “Exact”  from “Match Type”.

Search Status for Firefox

Search Status is a great little add-on for Firefox (don’t use Internet Explorer) which aggregates a few useful SEO tools. Most notable is the Google PageRank (PR) feature which clearly shows a certain website’s clearly. This is a great way of quickly seeing how reputable Google see’s the site as being. If you right click on parts of the toolbar you will see you can easily find a website’s backlinks, Google cache and indexed pages plus much more.

Yahoo Site Explorer

This tool shows every backlink your website has that has been cached by Yahoo. It generally rates links in order of importance, so this is the perfect tool to find out exactly how many link you have, how many you need to be up with your competitors, and where your important links are.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is unbelievably valuable for any webmaster. It tracks every visitor to your site, where they came from, what keywords they used to search, which pages get visited the most, each pages bounce rate, where they are located and much, much more. If you can become an Analytics expert, and then optimise your website based on that information, you need know no more.

These are all you need to get started. Give some of them a go and let me know what you think. These are simply the basic (yet most useful tools) I use. Drop me a comment if you think I’ve left out something worthwhile…