A great video on SEO given by Google’s own Matt Cutts at this years WordCamp. Definitely a great video to teach both beginners and advanced users SEO techniques that are prevalent in todays world. The video is about an hour long and will provide some great insight for those that are interested in SEO. Enjoy!

SENuke is a tool that as of late was extremely buggy and required a lot of changes, but hold the phone, a friend recently told me they had updated so I thought I’d take a peek at just how well this little program performs. Now when I say little, that’s an understatement, as SENuke can do a LOT of great things, fairly quickly and without you even needing to be there to monitor it.

SENuke features include:

1. Keyword Research Tool (AND Niche Research Ideas!)
2. Web 2.0 Properties Account Creation
3. Full Article Spinning with added bonus from Content Boss
4. Social Network/Article Directory Submitter (Over 40 Sites)
5. Video Submitter (11 Sites)
6. RSS Feed Submissions (19 Sites)
7. Web 2.0 Account Creation Module for over 400 high PR sites.

Now if those features alone don’t get you salivating, let me tell you just how powerful this program is.  You can literally create account on every high ranking site in the book, post articles on the fly that are automatically spun for uniqueness, and then send off rss feeds all while pinging every newly created page to send the search engines feeding upon your pages.

They include a keyword research tool which will even tell you just how competitive your term is and how easy it will be to outrank your competition. Brilliant! All accounts are created automatically with full captcha bypass for the social network/article sites, however if you get into the social profile module sites (500+ sites) then you will need to fork out $7 per 1000 captchas to a service called BypassCaptcha.com. This is highly recommended as you really dont want to sit around entering captcha codes for hours, you might go insane.

The article creation allows for full spinnable articles in an easy to use manner similar to Power Article Rewriter or UAW. You can check uniqueness and also auto-generate spun variations using Content Boss, which is another added cost of $30 a month, but well worth it IMO.

Try it out, its $127 a month currently and right now you can try it out for 30 days for absolutely free. I know that the power in this tool wont last forever, so get the jump on it, and start automating your link building with a state-of-the-art method that is proven to boost your rankings and make you more money, plain and simple.

Aaron Wall over at SEOBook has recently released a great tool that I am just diving into called the SEO Toolbar. So far this thing looks great, its got a bunch of nifty features as well as an SEO X-ray tool and a competitive analysis tool which look like they will be really useful. The competition tool can track data from Compete, Google Trends, Quantcast, Alexa & SEMRush as well as show PPC destination urls.

What would happen if you smooshed together many of the best parts of Rank Checker, SEO for Firefox, the best keyword research tools across the web, a feed reader (pre-populated with many SEO feeds), a ton of competitive research tools, the ability to compare up to 5 competing sites against each other, easy data export, and boatloads of other features into 1 handy Firefox extension? Well, you would have the SEO Toolbar.

Some of the main features listed are:

• Google PR
• Yahoo linkdomain/pagelinks
• DMOZ/Yahoo/BOTW Directories
• Archive.org Site Age
• Compete.com Uniques
• SEMRush.com Traffic Value
• Competition Analysis
• SE Rank Checker
• SEO X-Ray
• Keyword Suggestion

And that’s not even half of it.  There are tips and techniques available for the more advanced SEO’s out there, as well as a generalized section for the total newbs.  All in all I think this will be a great plugin, and might even replace my Google toolbar and SEO for Firefox altogether.

For a full list of features head over to the download and overview page.

Today I am going to talk about the steps put forward when taking on a new SEO client or when optimizing my own sites.  I use a 10 step formula which basically covers all aspects of optimization and ranking.

From competitive analysis, keyword research, directories and articles all the way through to social bookmarking. Everything you need to get started optimizing your site today, in a quick and easy to follow manner. So lets get started..

1. Initial Analysis

During the initial analysis of a campaign I will look at what your target niche is and plan around where you would like to take it. Whether that may be a service or product route or if your simply ranking for an aggregate affiliate program, the ground work needs to be laid out so you can decide on which keywords to focus on, which leads into the next stage.

2. Keyword Research and Analysis

Perhaps the most important of all the stages, keyword analysis sets the tone for your entire optimization process and will prove whether or not you are successful marketing with the search engines.  I like to use Keyword Elite for my research as it has a friendly interface and makes your keyword research a breeze.  What you are looking for when researching keywords are niche relevant words that have a decent amount of search traffic, but not so much as to make it too competitive.  Its about finding the right balance, which can sometimes be hard to do.   Thankfully there are other tools available like the Google Keyword Tool which can make this daunting task simple.

3. Competitor Analysis

Once you have your keywords selected you will need to take a look at what the top sites in your niche are doing to have those top rankings.  You can use free online tools like SEO Digger to lookup their info, or you can use a more complete solution like SEO Elite which will automate it all for you (in a very similar way to Keyword Elite).  Once you know what your competition is doing, or not doing, you will have an advantage on where to go next in terms of your optimization campaign.

4. Sitemap/RSS Feed Inclusion

The next step I like to do is generate an xml sitemap for google, so that the spiders can start tracking your pages as fast as possible.  If you are running a wordpress blog, this task is done quickly and easily with the Google Sitemaps plugin. After creating an xml sitemap I make sure I have an RSS feed setup for subscribers, and make sure its easily accessible.

5. Search Engine + Directory Submission

While it is debated that you should allow the spiders to crawl your pages instead of submitting to the SE’s, I myself have never had any issues with this and always find that I can get my pages indexed that much faster simply be submitting to the major engines. (Yahoo, Google, Msn)  Directory submission is a whole other ballgame.  There are services on Wickedfire and DP for directory submission and you can usually get your site submitted to 500+ directories for pretty cheap.  While this doesn’t really boost you THAT much in the rankings, it does help and should not be overlooked.

6. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is submitting your site and your sites content across social networks like digg, reddit, furl, delicious, technorati and the list goes on.  Even now I would consider using twitter as a social bookmarking tool.  I prefer using Bookmarking Demon for my submission as it makes it quick and painless for a task that would otherwise be mundane and time-consuming.  There are other free services out there like Social Marker that do the same thing in essence, so be sure to check them out too.

7. Blogs & Press Release Creation

Its a no brainer that the search engines love wordpress, so creating a blog for rankings should fall hand in hand with any SEO campaign.  At the same time creating a press release for the launch of a new product or service is a great way to build steam aka traffic for your site.  Once you have a press release written up I would recommend using PR Wizard to get it blasted out to over 28,000 media outlets, which in turn create backlinks and much needed publicity, a big plus.

8. Article Submission

Once you have some content on your blog/site, you will undoubtedly have some articles in which to press around the various article sites on the net.  Now while there are a few major ones which gain more precedence than others, I prefer to just submit them to the whole lot using Article Post Robot. This neat little application allows you to select as little or as many article sites from their database of over 500.  You can select sites with the highest PR or you can just choose the ones that don’t require a login (save time), the choice is entirely up to you.

9. Link Popularity

Link popularity is the measure of quality incoming links from other sites.  The more backlinks you have from higher PR sites, the higher your link popularity will be.  There are service sites out there that will check it for you, or you can go the old fashion way and just go to Google and type link:www.sitename.com and get your total number of listed backlinks.

10. SERP Report

Once I have completed all these aforementioned steps I usually do a final report to see where I am ranking and also to see what I can improve upon.  I record my keywords and where they are ranking at the start of my campaign, and then do another lookup at the end of the campaign (usually a month) to see the progress I have made. I prefer to use SEO Elite for my reporting but there are a slew of programs out there that you can use.

I don’t cover link bait development in my SEO campaigns, and I don’t drive tons of backlinks using other social media methodologies not discussed.  But using these basic 10 steps you can build a basis to work from, and will more than anything be a step ahead of the competition.  And as niches and sites get more and more competitive, it definitely doesn’t hurt to get a step ahead.

When it comes to getting your website ranked in the SE’s, it comes down to variety of factors that all pertain to your pages overall visibility. Lower visibility on the search engines means less traffic, and less reach, we don’t want that. So how does page ranking actually work you may ask. Behind all the complex algorithms put in place by Google, the actual system for ranking is quite simple. I will go over some of the best ways you can optimize your site to make sure you have the best ranking possible across all SE’s, not just big G.

External Links: Page Rank is frequently amplified by the # and quality of inbound links. The better the sites that link back to yours, the better. You can attain these through massive email campaigns, networking with similar sites, or buying reciprocal links. Stay away from link trades as they are now deemed a negative impact on ranking as well as your SERP.

google pagerank explained

Keywords: SEO, SEM, Meta Tags, various social media advertising platforms (Adwords/YSM/Facebook Ads) all rely on these crucial elements. There are two types of keywords that can be implemented. Firstly there is the primary keyword which is the base for what you are targeting. Then you have a secondary keyword which is less pertinent but still helps to pinpoint what you’re targeting. Try to avoid keyword spam, as you need to place your primary keywords throughout your site strategically (H1, Title Tags, etc.) so that the SE’s can place your site quickly and easily.

Optimizing website content: The driving force that contributes to page ranking is textual content. You need to ensure that your web site has sufficient text on each page to facilitate proper indexing by the SE’s. Also keep in mind that the text on your page will not include images or Flash elements. The body copy of a web page should have the correct and most important keyword phrases.

Page titles: You need to create appropriate page titles for each of the web pages on your website. A page title is the first line of copy that is displayed during search listing. To attract visitors, you need to apply the right keywords and compelling copy in page titles.

Dynamic URLs: If you are using a dynamic URL then search engines will face difficulty in indexing your web pages. Try to avoid using dynamic URL’s.

Edit: Flash/JavaScript content: I was unaware, but apparently the SE’s can now read data from flash files, so feel free to create your menu’s and navigation in flash, however I would shy away from this as im sure not ALL the SE’s can read your swf’s. As for JavaScript, the SE’s also have trouble indexing websites using Java based navigation, so stay away from it.

While most SEO’s already know the ins and outs of off-site search engine optimization, but what often gets overlooked is the actual on-site SEO which may be a key reason as to why you are not at the top of the SERP’s. I’ve compiled a list of things the beginner SEO can do to make sure his or her site is fully optimized for the search engines.

1. The Title Tag – Single handedly the most crucial element of on-site optimization. Make sure you have your main keywords in here. A useful plug-in for this if your using Wordpress is optimal title.
2. The H1/H2 Text – Are also extremely important because they show the search engine the main subjects and “table of contents” for your sites content. These should be targeted towards the keywords you want to rank for, and should be indicative of your title tag.
3. First sentence of body text – In terms of advanced SEO tactics, the first sentence for the body for every page on your site will be picked up by the SE’s and more importantly are picked up by Google’s LSI algorithm.
4. Meta Keywords, Description and Robots Tag — The site’s meta tags are always used to place your site in the rankings. As well your sitemap.xml will be looked at by Google on a regular basis so keep it updated.
5. The Body Text – Try to keep your focused body text in bold as this will be more emphatic to the search engines.
6. The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be optimized. A useful way to do this with wordpress is through permalinks. (Settings -> Permalinks -> Custom Structure, and then use “/%category%/%postname%/”) So for http://site.com/SEO-optimization-in-toronto.html would rank higher for a page devoted to “SEO optimization in Toronto” simply due to this structure.
7. Same Site Link Texts — Make sure all your pages of your site are inter-linked or have some type of navigation whereas your main pages you are trying to rank for are linked. Make sense? Having your targeted keywords linked to other relevant pages can go a long way for a little higher rankings.
8. Same-Site Link URLs — Don’t just use keywords to describe pages inside your site, those URLs you link to should include SEO URLs as well. (eg: http://site.com/your-keyword.html)
9. Keyword Density — While this topic is generally up for debate, the general consensus is to have anywhere between 5-8% of your total text. So for a 500 word article you should have anywhere between 25-40 of those words as some sort of derivative of the keyword you are trying to rank for. While this isn’t THAT important for rankings, it should still be considered.
10. Image ALT Tags — Lastly you should always make sure to have your images optimized for keywords you wish to rank for. It wouldn’t hurt to go as far as to change the names of the images to be keyword-rich as well.

By using these simple methods, you can get a jump start on your off-site SEO so that you can focus more on getting inbound, authority backlinks from relevant sites. Then all you can do from there is write viral content and link build like a madman. I will be doing a follow up post on off-site SEO methods so stay tuned.