This does pose an interesting challenge, although I’d love to hear some feedback on best practices and (ethical) shortcuts to achieve a better ranking for my own personal “brand name” Calle Hunefalk.

I would love to get your comments below.

Four SEO Focus Areas

1. Make sure your site is optimized for search engines
   • Use a checklist to ensure that your website is technically optimized for search engines. Without a search engine friendly website, you’ll not get the same results, regardless of your other SEO. I have a 100+ point checklist for my clients, you can compile your own by looking at resources like Google Ranking Factors.
   • If you use a Wordpress blog, check out this post on SEO for Wordpress for some handy tips.
   • At the very least, the main sections of your website should be optimized with relevant titles, meta tags and not be based on Javascript or Flash. If you do use excessive Javascript or Flash, provide alternative pages for search engines to index.
   • DO NOT TAKE SHORCUTS. Cheating will jump up and bite you, in the end. There is no substitute for doing it the right way.
2. Keyword Research and Content Evaluation
   • The second step involves identifying keywords and content on your website. A nice tool like SEODigger will help get you started, to identify which key phrases you rank in the top 20 for. Just search on your own website URL, and you’ll get a list of key phrases.
   • It’s important to get creative with the words you optimize your website for. WordTracker lets you identify which keywords have the most searches with the least competion. This is good for both your SEO efforts and SEM advertising.
   • Start adding content and keep adding content. The debate on whether ‘Content is King’ or not has been going on for years between various online professionals, but I think it’s safe to say that the more optimized content you have on your website, the more likely you are to attract visitors via search engines.
   • Stay relevant. Write useful content for your niche target audience. Keyword stuffing (cramming keywords into texts without relevant context) is a bad practice, and it will not get you results in the long run.
3. Competitive SEO Analysis
   • In SEO, you have two types of competitors; the ones from your industry (in real life) and the ones that compete for the keywords that are relevant to you.
   • Use SEODigger to identify which (and how many) keywords your competitors rank in the toip 20 for.
   • Use tools like SEO Spyglass to figure out who your competitors are and which pages link to them.
   • Build a list of keyword phrases in your industry – keep track of the keywords in Excel or another useful tool.
   • Build a list of backlinks (links from external pages) to your competitors.
4. Link Building
   • Search engines place different value on links to a website (link popularity), but there is not doubt that the number of incoming links to a page effects SEO.
   • Use the list of backlinks from the Competitive SEO Analysis and identify the Google PageRank and Alexa Rank for each link (using tools that do this in a batch format).
   • Sort links based on ranking. Remove the links that have PageRank below 4 and Alexa Rank below a million.
   • Start from the top of the list, and research the pages. Look into whether the website is owned by a competitor (doing a Whois) or if perhaps the competitor could have paid for a link. Remove any such links from the list.
   • Add a description to each of the remaining links on your worksheet, of the website and how you can add a link to it. For example, you can update Wikipedia yourself, but unless you add relevant content, it will be removed again. For DMOZ, you have to adhere to the rules before you submit your site to a moderator.
   • For a detailed link building process, have a look at Linking Matters – although it’s a bit old, and you shouldn’t spam website owners with linking requests, there are a lot of good details on link building (without direct SEO focus, but it helps SEO as well).

Finally, always remember to keep track of your business objectives. Add, optimize, monitor and revise. Keep it up and you will see the results – optimize your content based on which keywords are generating the revenue for you.

photo courtesy of allshots_imaging

Do you count the PageRank as an important measurement for your website?

photo courtesy of dullhunk

What SEO is not

First of all, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is NOT a channel you pay for to get traffic to your website. You’d be surprised how many marketing professionals that buy traffic online think that SEO is probably similar to SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns where you buy traffic. Well, even though the disciplines are related, they are actually very different.

So what is SEO?

SEO is using techniques to gain a high ranking in search engine results for targeted websites. Optimizing a website for search engines involved four focus areas, two of which are on your website, and the other two are off your website.

• Technical on-page/on-site structure for search engines to be able to scan and index your website
• Content copywriting, keyword optimization (+ keyword identification), linking to internal and external urls (link to authority sources)
• Link building, how to identify authority websites, avoiding paid links, linkfarms and FFAs
• Competitive analysis, locating competitors and their ranking, competitor keywords

When optimizing for search engines, it is important to start from the top of the list, to have your website up and running, and optimized in the technical structure and content to be indexed well by search engines. An optimized website will rank higher once you go out and ‘build’ links to your website on external sites.

Why can’t I pay for SEO traffic?

Search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo try to establish credibility with their user base to deliver independent and relevant results to searches. If the results on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are paid, it can skew the results so that the advertiser with the biggest budget ranks highest in the search results. Therefore, the only way to pay for search engine visiblity is through SEM, where your ad is displayed in marked sections as sponsored links.

SEO benefits

• Organic search engine traffic is free. Even though you may pay a consultant or staff to work on SEO, the organic traffic that comes from search engines won’t cost you a cent. Besides, you pay for online marketingstaff already, don’t you?
• SEO has a long-term focus. It takes a long time to build links to your website from authority websites around the web, but once you have, you can reap the benefits. You *could* sit back and relax, but your competitors probably work on SEO as well, and there are new authority sites showing up constantly, so you need to keep working on SEO and set new goals even once you have reached high search engine rankings.

Add your thoughts

Do you have anything to add to the description above? Post your comments below. I’d love to hear you opinion.