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Search Engine Optimization Tips: 11 Ways To Avoid The Most Common SEO Mistakes
December 14th, 2009 | by BillEgan |If you follow these 11 pointers you will find that search engine optimization is not as difficult as you may have thought. 
Basically it is not rocket science – it does require time and lots of attention to detail.
Here are the tips in time sequence order.
1. Do Your Keyword research
Ask yourself a few important questions.
Is traffic volume the most important factor?
How can you select form the wide range of keyword options?
How can you select keywords for optimal profit?
I suggest you implement the 4 cardinal rules of keyword research
- Find markets with a minimum of 70 searches per day
- Make sure that the competition is less than 100,000
- Identify specific key phrases with a high visitor value
- Use a good keyword research tool
Use this process to select your top 10 keywords.
A useful search engine optimisation tip is to use Google Adwords to verify traffic volume and conversion rates and then mark each keyword as “ready for seo implementation”.
2. Audit Your Website:
You need to find out the answers to these questions?
- How does it rate with the search engines?
- How does it compare with competitors?
- What tasks need to be done to drive more traffic for given keywords?
- What should you do first to get the fastest results from search engine optimisation?
This search engine optimization tip explains How To Do a Website Audit and Benchmark Your Website for SEO?
3. Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing:
How do you find out what your competitors are actually doing in terms of SEO?
Remember you have two types of competition:
- Keyword competitors (This is your real online competition)
- Trade competitors (Most website owners are interested to see how they compare with known trade competitors)
Here is another search engine optimisation tip that will give you lots of pointers on Competitor Analysis – 10 Key SEO Factors to look out for.
4. Benchmark Your Keywords
This will give you a benchmark to start with so you can measure ongoing improvements as you implement your seo project.
5.     Analyse Your External Links
This will help you find out about how many and what quality are the external links to your website. If the majority of your external links are coming from low authority websites you will need to address this to get better keyword visibility.
You are now ready to start implementing your seo project.
6. Edit and amend you’re Meta Tags
The most important is the title tag and then the description tag. You can ignore the keywords tag as this is no longer used by Google.
7. Clean Up Code If Required
This usually involves fixing any issues with html code, CSS, broken links or navigation.
8. Insert keywords in your URL’s
Get human readable urls that match chosen keywords
9. Create or Fix Your Site map
This will involve generating or optimising any existing site map and developin an XML site map.
10. Insert Keywords in Links
Implement internal and external links that align with keywords.
11. Consider a Blog
Your will need to think carefully about this as a blog requires a major investment to sustain it.
If you need search engine optimisation tips on blogging you can review the considerations and pitfalls of a blog in these article s:
A Business Blog: 6 Reasons Why You Need One
Business Blogging: 5 Tips to Avoid Failure.
So, how much would you expect to pay for this work? A wide range of service providers can quote you for this service. You are in a better position if you have done the above analysis as you can prepare a specific Requirement Specification Document.
Ultimately the price paid should be based on the expected ROI from the campaign.
Alternatively you could choose a software tool to enable you or your web designer or webmaster to do much of the work internally.
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3 Responses to “Search Engine Optimization Tips: 11 Ways To Avoid The Most Common SEO Mistakes”
By Nick @ Brick Marketing on Jan 4, 2010 | Reply
I think the most important step is really making sure the website is 100% optimized. It needs to be polished before one can move onto the link building aspect.