Whether you are paying for online advertising, performing search engine optimization on your web site or creating a linking campaign, keyword research is the starting point and critical foundation of all your SEO web design.

Keyword research involves properly identifying your list of primary and longtail keywords to be used in all of your web site marketing efforts.  Guessing games won’t work here.  Specific tools, methods and analysis are used based on your product/service and it’s industry, your marketing goals and budget.  You should also note that as the market and web surfers searching habits change over time, so may your keyword list.

Competition Analysis in Web Site Marketing

If you want to know who your top online competitors are and why they rank the way they do, then a thorough competition analysis is important.  Once that analysis is complete, you can then use that information to figure out how to possibly “one up them.”  For example, in search engine results, there are often many sites on the first page that have missed one or more of the key factors in ranking well and are therefore vulnerable to being knocked down.

Competition analysis involves analyzing your competitors’ sites to determine the SEO strategy and keywords of the top ranked sites in your industry. The top ranked sites may or may not be following the SEO rules, and it’s important to know what works and doesn’t work for your industry and keywords. Competitor analysis is extremely important to your SEO strategy. The best way to see what works the most is to study your competitors.

Building backlinks to your web site is part of off-page seo and has become one of the most important aspects of search engine ranking.  The number of links pointing to your site, the anchor text on those links and the page rank/authority of the site sending you the link are all critical.

Aside from Google, the most important sites to get listed in are: The Yahoo Directory (not free,) Dmoz.org (free, but takes a long time) and Business.com. Google considers these sites very, very important and they have excellent ranking, which means your Google ranking will increase by association.

Top search engine ranking is great, but you should realize that an effective back-linking profile can provide your site with more traffic than you would get from top spots in the search engines. A good backlink profile has many advantages and is one of the most important strategies to focus on during your web marketing efforts. Getting links from sites with related content will boost your search engine rankings, give you consistently more traffic and eventually (with an effective ongoing link building campaign), release you from the problems associated with search engine algorithm changes).

There are two kinds of incoming links.  Reciprocal (link exchange, where you must link back to the other site from your web site) and One-Way.

Reciprocal links are generally free, but they don’t carry as much clout in Google’s eys and obtaining them effectively will take time and dedication as it’s quite a process. Not to mention that several outgoing links on your site will bleed your own Google pagerank. For these reasons, it’s recommended you focus your backlink building efforts on one-way links.

One-way links are given a higher weighted value in Google’s ranking algorithm.

Backlink “relevancy” is based on the content of the inbound link pointing to you. Basically, you want web sites with subject matter relevant to yours, to link to your web site. The Google pagerank of the web page linking to your site is also very important. It’s better to have five quality inbound links from authority (higher ranked sites) than a hundred lower-quality inbound links.

Building backlinks to your site is one of the most cost-effective advertising methods. You’ll get targeted traffic from people directly clicking on the links as well as free traffic from the search engines due to your increased pagerank and position in the search results.

Backlink Maintenance

• Always continue to build up your site’s backlink profile

• If you do decide to do some reciprocal linking (especially good if the sites you get links from have a higher pagerank than your site), then monthly you should re-affirm those incoming links. Validate the existence of your reciprocal links and follow-up with their webmasters if your link has been removed from their site. Also verify their page with your link is not:

• • Being blocked from spiders with their robot.txt file

  • Buried or orphaned

  • Using the nofollow tag to block search engines from following the link

1. A Keyword Domain Name – the web address/url for your web site
2. A Web Host – a place to put your site on the internet
3. A Professional Email Address – an email address at your domain.  This can be set up through your web hosting account.
4. A Web Site – an eCommerce site, a blog style site, a static style site or a web application
5. A Way to Drive Traffic to Your Site – offline and/or internet marketing

Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service which allows you to upload and store your web site pages, documents and related files on a web server (computers which contain the web hosting space where your web pages are stored.)  This makes the files (web pages) available for public viewing on the Internet.

The web hosting plan you choose will depend on your technology, marketing and customer service needs.

Preferred Web Host – Unless you know you’re going to need multiple web sites, a toll-free business phone number, private ssl, or anonymous ftp, then you should start out with the basic (“Hatchling”) plan.

Setting Up Your Email Account

The web hosting plan you purchased should’ve come with at least one email address that uses the domain name you purchased for your web site.  After you have your new email address set up at your web host (or other email provider), you then need to set up an email account within the email software on your computer to receive the incoming email.

If you didn’t set up your new email address with your web host or email host, then you need to contact the person who did because you’ll need some information from them before you can set up the email account on your computer.

Many people use either Microsoft Outlook Express (which is free with the Internet Explorer browser) or the Microsoft Office Outlook software which comes bundled with the Microsoft Office suite of software.  A great, free email software alternative is Mozilla Thunderbird.  It’s an add-on to the Firefox Browser and it’s very similar to Microsoft Outlook.  Thunderbird includes an email client, a calendar, a task list, an rss feed reader, and it even does IMAP.

Other Logistics

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
FTP is a way of transferring files over the Internet from one computer to another and comes in very handy when you have large size files and/or several files and it’s impossible or tedious to send them via email.  This is a great way to get your existing digital photo files, pdf files, brochures, etc to your web developer to use as content on your web site.
Accessing an FTP Directory

Unless the ftp location/address you were given is “anonymous”, then you’ll need to get a login name and password for this ftp location.  Many publicly accessible ftp directories have anonymous login, but when you are transferring files with a private business, you’ll likely need to get ftp login information from them before you will be able to gain access to their ftp directory.

FTP Software

You can ftp right from the URL address field in your web browser (note, this may not work with Internet Explorer on a Mac platform.)

Even better:  install the free FTP software ‘Fillezilla‘

One of the first things you need to do is purchase a domain name for your web site.  Using a keyword domain name is one element of “on-page seo” in SEO web design.  Having your primary keyword in your domain name will aid in your search engine rankings and in the SERPs.

In addition to purchasing a keyword domain name, you may also want to purchase a domain name that matches your company name to put on your print marketing and business cards.

Preferred Domain Registrar