SEO 101 - Concepts and first step.

Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is an oft misunderstood process due to complexity and the many different opinions put forth by the experts.
Some of the terms may be foreign so I will try to explain each as we come to them.

The concept of SEO is not to "game" the search engines with tricks, but to design for the visitor, primarily answering the question "What is in this site for me", and providing simple, clear navigation to other information that relates to the reader's needs..

SEO is also helping the search engines "understand" your page through the use of well placed and properly formatted text.

The first step occurs long before you have a website, business name, logo, or promotional copy.
It begins with your idea.

Once you have an idea of what you want to do online you should find out how and what people are looking for when they search for your product.
(Services are also considered "product", and for these discussions will be referred to as such.)

So you have an idea.
You have a product.

Now you need to find out how people will find you.
To do this you need to do some keyword research.

For the purposes of this discussion let us say you have decided you wish to sell candles.
Head up to www.SEOmoz.org and set up a free membership.
You will be using their tools during the course of this series and their registration is mandatory.

Then use their keyword difficulty tool using "candles". http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty
Set the 2nd input at 20 and go have a coffee. The tool takes a while to run.
You can run only two tests a day with the free membership.

The first report states"
Keyword(s): candles
Difficulty: 56%

46 - 60% Competitive, top rankings achievable only with highly optimized on-page content and substantial link strength.

So what does this tell you?

It shows that it will be difficult to get your page ranked well for the keyword "Candles".
It shows that there were only 20 searches last month (2) for the term. This is very low. (Personally this seems low to me. WHen I Checked Overture's database it showed some 22,000 searches done in the last 90 days.
(3), The number of results shows me that there are close to 40 MILLION competing sites.
(6), Shows that the main index page for the term is considered more important than inside, (sub), pages.
(10), Indicates That the top sites have excellent Page Rank so this means that you will have to develop yours if you want to compete.
The other factors are important but not related to choosing a keyword phrase.

When you do the search, you will see more results than I am posting here, but they contain other important information.
The primary information is that 6 out of the 10 have the word candles in their domain name.
Mark this well. It is of primary importance.
To compete you will HAVE to put your primary keyword(s) in your URL. (URL=Your domain name. Nerdish=Universal Resource Locator)
It is also recommended that you use your keywords in your business name.

How can you make this less competitive?

You need to target a "longer tail" search term.
Search terms are broken down to the length of the "tail" which represents the frequency/popularity of the search terms.
"Candle" would be the shortest tail you could get as it is one word and covers a lot of sub categories like soy candles or scented candles.
Basically, the longer the tail, the less competitive the term.

Now you need to find out what other terms are used when searching.
Go to WordTracker's free keyword suggestion tool. (The link will bring you to the search for "Candles")
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/?seed=Candles&suggest=Hit+Me&adult_filter=remove_dubious

Results show that out of over 326 million total searches done on their database 24,202 were done.
4469 for the short tail candles and 1204 for the shorter tail "scented candles".

Let us head back to SEOmoz and run our 2nd test for scented candles.

This time the search tells us:
Keyword(s): scented candles
Difficulty: 49%

46 - 60% Competitive, top rankings achievable only with highly optimized on-page content and substantial link strength>

Similar results but this time the longer tail has less competition, and is at the lower end of the difficulty class.

So where does this leave us?
You will stand a better chance at getting listed if you have BOTH keywords in your domain, (and business) name.
While there are other keywords like soy candles, they have less use, (Frequency of searches), so stick with the highest.

These results can be modified by real world stats.
Let us assume that you have a real world store that sells all kinds of candles and they Soy candles are the biggest seller or the product that brings in the most revenue.
This would modify the keywords that you choose for your online endeavor as it is always wise to target the products that make you the most money, even if the web stats do not support this.

This ends the first installment.
Tune in next week for #2 - Domain names - choosing, registering, and hosting.

Week 3 - Layout of site. User studies, content display and navigation

Week 4 - Satisfying "What's in this for me?" Text composition, anchor links, internal links and sub pages.

Week 5 - Behind the scenes. Code tweaks, meta tags.

Week 6 - My site is ready, now what? - Getting your site linked, submissions - manual and automated.

Week 7 - Page rank. What it means and how to get it.

Week 8 - Metrics. Interpreting web stats, adding stats/tracking programs.

Week 9 - Think you are finished? Think again. Adding content.

For weeks 3, 4, 5, and 6, I would like to call for volunteers to let me use their site as the example for the lesson.
Ryze members - Please post in this thread and I will pick one. In the case that more than one ask, I will make a random choice.

Reg

DotCom-Productions