Keyword Research
Keyword phrase research involves identifying a group of keyword phrases that will be used in optimization. This step is critical and requires a considerable amount of time to find a good set of phrases that offer a balanced combination of two important factors: high usage by searchers and relatively low competition within the search engines.

Determining the most used phrase that contains your targeted keyword(s) is relatively easy. Online tools allow you to enter a particular keyword or words and will return all the ways in which that word(s) was used by searchers in the last month and in what volume. However, the most used phrase(s) is also likely the one with the greatest competition within the search results and may, therefore, not be where you would want to devote your optimization efforts. A more effective approach is to find a set of phrases (10 is a nice round number) that are heavily used by searchers but somewhat less competitive in terms of the total number of search results.

For example, assume you own a business that leases apartments in a particular metropolitan area, "Big City." Your apartments are only located in one metro area, so you are not going to select general terms such as "apartments;" you are only interested in those searchers seeking an apartment in your city. The logical place to start is with the name of your city and the word "apartments." You may find that the most used phrase is "big city apartments." However, when you do sample searches in Google and Yahoo for that phrase you realize that the competition for that phrase is steep. If you go back to your findings from the keyword tool, you might find that a phrase such as "apartments in big city" is still heavily used by searchers but is far less competitive. Those phrases are the ones you will then target in the next step, site optimization.

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Reporting
After establishing your list of targeted keyword phrases, it is important to understand what the subject site's starting position is within the search engines. Doing so ensures that you know the specific areas that need work and provides a baseline against which to gauge the subsequent campaign's success. A program like WebPosition can be used to analyze the site's starting position.

In addition, access to site traffic information is very important. It can show how searchers are finding the subject site, e.g., which search engines and what keyword phrases are being used. Understanding the site's traffic level and the source of its referrals can also be a critical tool in making other online marketing decisions - which paid links/listings to continue and which to abandon for more effective options.

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Page Optimization and Content Development
Page optimization and content development are critical to search engine success. Content is king in search engine optimization. The search engines love text; high volume, high-quality content related to your business will serve you in a couple of important ways.

First, a site loaded with high-quality content of interest to site users will give them a reason to stay and a reason to come back. After all, the reason they came to your site was to find information. Second, you will receive the added benefit of serving up exactly what the search engines want - content. Search engines will have more information to store about your business and products; that information will translate directly into the ranking they give your site for related keyword phrases. For more information on content development and specific ideas about ways to expand your site's content, read our newsletter article, Content is King.

In addition to content development, other important optimization tactics include:

• Page Titles - Make sure that your site's page titles say something other than just your company name or "welcome." Ideally, they need to lead off with your targeted phrase for that page and then follow with your company name.

• Text-Based Navigation - Search engines cannot read images. If your site's navigation system is done with images (most are), you will need a text-based navigation system that the search engines can follow to ensure that all the important service and product-related sub-pages of your site are indexed by the search engines.

• Prominence of Targeted Keyword Phrases - It is not enough to have your keyword phrase(s) somewhere on the web page, the placement and prominence given to them also affects your search engine placement. For example, leading off the site's first paragraph with your keyword phrase gives it more weight than burying it half way down the page in the middle of a paragraph. Also, using larger font sizes and bolding the text can emphasize its importance and positively effect the page's ranking for that phrase.

• Site Map - Developing a site map that includes a well-organized list of links to all the important pages of your site and includes a text link to the site map on your home page is the ideal way to make sure that all the site's pages are indexed by the search engines when they visit the subject site.

• ALT and META data - These are tags not seen by the site's users; they are embedded in the site's html code. ALT tags refer to the text that describes an image -- words that you see pop up as you mouse over some images. In optimizing your company's name, an ALT tag placed behind the image of your company's logo is ideal. Meta tags (there are both description tags as well as keyword tags) are lines of code included in the uppermost section of your site's code. They communicate the site's subject matter and relevancy to the search engines. Further, the short description of your site included in some search results is pulled from the meta description tag of the home page and should, therefore, be used to the site's advantage.

• Clean up the Code - Navigation rollovers and other JavaScript-based code should be taken out of the code of each page and put into an external file to which each page of the site is referenced. Doing this has several advantages, but one of the most compelling is that your site's keywords and content all move up, up, up in the code, communicating their importance to the search engines and boosting your site's relevancy ratings. In other words, this can boost your search engine rankings. This is a simple and relatively inexpensive thing to do, depending on the total number of pages in your site.

• Maximize Quality Link Popularity - Link Popularity is the term given to the number of other sites linking to yours. You can check your link popularity with the free tool available on this site: www.linkpopularity.com.  Make a list of related businesses with whom you have a relationship, as well as professional organizations, vendors or suppliers that may agree to place a link to your site on theirs. Email your contact in those organizations requesting the link. Each new link to your site increases the likelihood of both the search engines' spiders running across your site as well as searchers looking for services or products like yours. A word of caution: free for all links sites and other low quality sites of that nature are of no use and can, in fact, detract from your progress with penalties from the search engines. Do not waste your time on such sites; stick to respectable, high quality sites in related businesses or industries.

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Submission

The submission process has changed considerably in the last two years and is less critical than it used to be (in its traditional methods). Still, it is a good idea to submit your site manually to a few select web sites (Yahoo and Google, for example). Links to their submission pages are provided below:

• Submit your site to Google

• Submit your site to Yahoo! Search (this is their free option; it does require that you be a registered Yahoo user)

The best way, however, to get indexed by the major search engines is for them to find a link to your site in their routine spidering of other sites. If there is a link to your web site on another site that Google visits regularly, it will grab your site link in the process. A higher value is placed on that link than on a manual submission done by the site owner. In launching new sites and performing SEO work for clients, I approach the process in both ways. I both hand-submit the site to Yahoo and Google and place a link to the client site on my home page. This is an effective two-pronged strategy. And it highlights the importance maximizing your link popularity (explained above).

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Follow Up Reporting and Analysis
The same reporting done in the first step is done again at 1 month, 3 months and 4 months intervals, post-optimization. Rankings and site traffic can then be compared to pre-optimization levels, giving measurable results to the SEO campaign.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

Time Frame - It can take a while for the search engines to index a site and the rankings to change for that site. For some search engines, the lag time between the work and seeing results can be as long as six months. Clients need to be patient and have realistic expectations regarding the time frame involved with organic (the natural, non paid results) search engine rankings. If the business need for increased search engine prominence is greater than can be met with optimization alone, I recommend adding a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to the marketing mix to bridge the time. PPC campaigns such as Google's AdWords can be set up in a matter of days, allowing for immediate results.

Content Development - The SEO work we perform includes minor non-substantive changes to the site's existing content/text, emphasizing the targeted keyword phrases. We make recommendations on new content; the writing of any new substantive content is the responsibility of the client. We then take your words and make our non-substantive changes to it, in order to maximize its effectiveness. If you do not want us to make these minor changes to the site's text, please let us know.

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