This is a big one as there are many, many SEO tools available – both free and fee based.  So we will start with recommending some on-site SEO tools and we will assume you are not a senior SEO or you probably wouldn’t be reading this post.

Regarding fee based tools, we would recommend either IBP4 or WebPosition 4 as both of them offer a variety of tools in one convenient package.  Since this is about onsite optimization, we recommend you have the software take a look at your key pages.  The will compare you to your competitors and suggest changes that need to be made in order to rank well in the search engines.  For the money these tools are better than any of the free ones.

Some very good free tools include: SEOmoz page strength tool, LinkVendor offers a variety of easy to use tools, SEO Company Website Analysis, and a meta tag checker is avaible here.

Today’s Task: Review the list of tools.  Save the free ones to your favorites and purchase one of the software packages.

[tags] seo tools, IBP4, WebPostion 4, SEOmoz, LinkVendor, SEO Company [/tags]

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Hopefully you have selected a couple of keyword research tools and are ready to go.  Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO.   Without this component, all of your efforts to create a website and rank well in the major search engines may go for not.  The process of keyword research involves several phases:

Check Your Website Analytics- Seeing how past or potential customers found your site is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what’s likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates.

Brainstorming – Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc).

Applying Data from Keyword Research Tools – All of the tools we recommended in the previous post offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in keyword selection.

Term Selection – The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyzes the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy, and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target.  We suggest keeping this fairly simple.  Just list the number of searches and the KEI index if available.  The KEI (or similar metrics) tell you how difficult it might be to obtain a high SERP ranking.  Again, we highly recommend you select only phrases with 3 words or more unless you have a very established website.

Today’s Task:  Create a list of 10-20 keyword phrases to target for your website.  Choose one phrase as your main keyword phrase.  Do not select more than 20 phrases.  This list will be updated over time, but will serve as your starting point.

[tags] keyword research, KEI, SERP, SEO, keyword phrases [/tags]

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Keyword research is the cornerstone of your SEO plan.  Many website owners dream up an idea for a site, build it, and never truly consider the proper usage of keywords.  It’s critical, as that is how you are found by the search engines and the searchers themselves.

People often start searching with broad results in mind. However as they get closer to making a decision, they narrow the results by adding more keyword to their search.  The "long tail" in search can be anything from three words to as many as ten.  It is very important to create content that shows up when your potential customer enters that longer keyword phrase in the box.  This means that you most likely will need a detailed keyword analysis to find out what your customers are really searching for with their keywords.

There are a few fee-based tools you can take a look at: Keyword Discovery, Keyword Country, Keyword Elite and Wordtracker.  However, one of our favorites is actually free.  Take a look at SEO Book’s free keyword tool.  One last recommendation is IBP4 from Axandra, which is primarily an SEO tool but also includes a keyword research feature.  We will be recommending IBP4 in the coming days, so you might consider purchasing it now.

Today’s Task: Choose a keyword research tool or two for you to use and get it!  Tomorrow we will begin the actual research.

[tags] keyword research, keyword discovery, keyword country, keyword elite, wordtracker, seo book, IBP4 [/tags]

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Before we head down any search engine optimization path, we need to make some assumptions about your site. 

We assume it is a real site that provides a product, information or service of interest to your visitors.  We hope that it is not a porn site, warez site or any other site that is just not doing the right thing.

We also assume that you are the "webmaster" or have easy access to your webmaster if changes are required based on our SEO recommendations.

Lastly, we assume you care enough about your site, that you are willing to commit and hour or so every business day to tell the world about it — thus building links and driving traffic to it.

If our assumptions are right, you have come to the right place.  Lets get started with your SEO plan.

[tags] search engine optimization, seo recommendation, webmaster [/tags]

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