Important SEO Tips

1. Long Tail Titles + ContentIn highly competitive markets, generic title tags just don't get it done anymore, although title tags can be one of the more important elements that the search engines look at to identify and categorize your page.End users are becoming more and more knowledgeable about how search engines work; the more descriptive words they use, the more likely they are to get the results that they are looking for. What this means is that last year the key phrase for company "A" was Debt Help. This year their top keyword phrase is Get Debt Free. I don't know why, maybe there is a major company out there doing debt consolidation ad campaigns that have "coined" this phrase to make it more memorable than debt help. Who knows? The point is that they are using a completely different search phrase, and the phrase is three words rather than two words.Generally speaking, "the lower number of words the better" has been the overall suggested recommendation to target because human nature is the path of least resistance. To a point it still is, but the people using longer phrases (based on my analytics) know what they are looking for, because they convert at a significantly higher rate.Once I have identified these phrases I start building additional pages, or even microsites (for purposes of A/B, funnel, and conversion testing) and I target the 3, 4, 5 or even 6 word long tail phrases.
Use these longer keyword phrases within your content as well. If possible, replace enough of the current keywords with the long-tail keywords. (This presumes that you do not build separate pages).If you are in a highly competitive market, this could be the answer that you are looking for to attract the middle 40-80 percent of the target audience that you are looking for, plus get great conversion rates. Just be sure to create well structured "calls to action" in the page. (See #5 below).
2. Advanced Keyword Selection
This has been covered over and over again, but it is a very important element and ongoing research is crucial to help you stay ahead of the competition. There are several tools out there, most of which are free, or offer free trials. I typically use several different tools.Google Trends - According to Google "Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it."This is great if you are in an industry that has seasonal traffic. This identifies the seasonality of keyword searches. Google also has a keyword tool that will take a large list of keywords and, when filtered by Search Volume Trends, give you a list that contains 12 months of data and which month showed the highest occurrence. KeywordDiscovery collects search term data from just over 180 search engines worldwide. Their database contains approximately 32 billion searches from the last 12 months. Their Premium Database contains over 600 million results.
What I like is that they cover a wider demographic than the other paid tools available. Although the new WordTracker UK version is a great addition for our company, being that it is based in the UK, KeywordDiscovery seems to be a better choice for those in a European market. Major differences are the databases from which they pull their results. WordTracker uses 4 or 5 sources (e.g. MetaCrawler, DogPile and Overture), while KeywordDiscovery uses Google, Yahoo Groups, DMOZ, MSN, Teoma, Miva and over 50 other databases. They also pull from databases in Japan, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia, Spain, Mexico, Israel, South Africa, India, and Norway. In the UK alone they use 11 different engines including google.co.uk.
SpyFu is a neat (and free) tool that can eliminate keywords that you may think are good to use, but may not convert well. It is a tool for Google Adwords and useful if you are trying to determine an estimated spend for individual keywords.
I use this keyword tool to see what terms companies are bidding on that are related to my query. Chances are, if they are bidding on it, then it's probably converting. This helps me eliminate broad terms as well (e.g. parts, cars). I guess you can use other tools to base KEI (keyword effectiveness index) on and do close to the same thing, but SpyFu makes it a little easier and faster.
It will also show you misspelled terms. Of course many of these tools have this function but again, this tool does it quicker. Here's an example of what SpyFu came up with when I searched for 'advanced auto parts';
advaced auto partsadvancd auto partsadvancded auto partsadvence auto partsadvenced auto partsafter market auto partsaftermarket auto partsanvance auto parts
So it doesn't just show ergonomic misspellings, it also shows 'stoopid' misspellings.
HitTail is a tool that I hold near and dear to my heart because I had some of input into its development, and they added a few features that I requested while using it for Pay Per Click keyword research. (Well, that and the fact that the tool saved my client £90,000 a year).
The tool was originally designed to do what log files can basically do, but quicker and easier. HitTail gathers the keyword and keyword phrases that brought your visitors to the site and graphs them to identify niche phrases that have high KEI so that you can use them in articles or online content. They added an XML export feature that I love because I can use it while creating AdWords campaigns and save myself a ton of time.
The reason I use it for keyword research is two-fold:
It's quicker and easier than log file data mining.
I can quickly identify the long 4-6 keyword phrases to use in my content.
Search engine users are become more savvy and their knowledge increases every day. They know that the more words they use to target their query the better the results will be. I see 20-30 percent of my visitors using 4+ keyword strings. Two years ago it was around 2-3.
3. Video Marketing
Video is huge, and will continue to grow quickly. Yahoo and YouTube average visits were between 13 to 15 minutes. Imagine getting people to watch an ad on television that long -- or what you would have to pay for that audience.
All it takes is a video camera or good webcam, some basic editing software, and you're ready to go. Be sure to keep the video short, something that people want to learn about or that will keep them watching, and place your URL somewhere in the video. At the end of the video include a "call to action." Submit your instructional video (or whatever you choose to do) to free video publishing sites such as YouTube, Shorkle, Veoh, Furl, Bolt, MovieMasher, Zango, Badongo, MyUseNet and many others.Continue to work on this and master your editing skills. Be sure to name the file with your keywords. You would be surprised how many of these video ads are showing up on the first page in normal Google searches. This will give you a great advantage over your competition if videos (or what I like to call free advertising) can be applied to your niche market.4. Create a Link Building Campaign
If you haven't done this yet, you are already behind. Link building is an acceptable practice if it is done the right way. Here I'll tell you what I think is the right way.
You need to set some type of budget. Whether you're an individual with one or two accounts, or an agency with dozens, you need to have some type of budget set aside for this. It can be money or it can be time.
Here is how I segment my campaigns;
15% - 25% to purchase one-way back links to internal pages. Not text links. I create custom/bespoke articles that will complement the owner's site, and that have my keyword phrase within it as my anchor text. I also make sure that it is a relevant site to my article/anchor text.
25% - 30% reciprocal link exchange. Not text links. I create custom/bespoke articles that will complement the owner's site, and that have my keyword phrase within it as my anchor text. I also make sure that it is a relevant site to my article/anchor text.
25% for blogs and forums. It's considered Guerilla Marketing. This takes a little longer because you need to establish yourself within communities and become somewhat of an authority that can post links to relevant and useful content on a site. This will attract actual traffic (and improved rankings), and also create natural back links from other end-users.
25% Use an automated tool (IBP 9.0 - Axandra) to find potential link partners. You can find a complete guide on how to use this along with Firefox and SEO Quake extension on the SES London Presentations Page. The username is london2007 and the password is febpres07.
Now whether you hire students to do these tasks or you do them yourself, they need to be part of your daily routine. Obviously there are other considerations such as building good content that people want to link to, creating top 10 lists, how-to guides and reviews, but not all markets have the ability to do these in a relevant way. My recommendation in this type of situation, and really any others, is to do a who-is lookup, pick up the phone and start calling. These are the best kind of back links.