Keyword/Phrase Research - this step is key in the SEO process and should be first above any other step. First, you need to find the keywords/phrases that you think a person would search for to find your website. For more detail go to: www.thesearchengineprimer.com. Really you are researching keywords that are targeted and relevant to your market. Next you will research the traffic volume or popularity of the keywords/phrases, this is essential because it would be pointless to optimize your website for a keyword or phrase that gets zero (0) searches. Next you will research the Competition of the keywords or key phrases that you have chosen. If a keyword/phrase is too competitive you have to analyze whether or not it is worth optimizing. The reason for this is simple, if you have chosen the keyword "Real Estate" then you have a huge task ahead of you. We are not saying that you can't get ranked on the first page of the major search engines for this keyword but you have to decide if it is worth the time and effort. Choose keywords/phrases that are unique and yet are attainable.
Ural/Domain Name Optimization - Once you have found your main keyword you are going to focus on the next step, which is to decide what your Domain name is going to be. You might ask, "What is a Domain Name?" A Domain Name is the name that a person would type into a web-browser to visit your website e.g. To optimize your Domain Name you will want to find something that is short, targeted to your market, explains your site, and uses the main keyword you have chosen through your Keyword Research. So for example if your keyword was "Real Estate" then you would want to use those keywords in your domain name. Some may argue that using the keywords in your domain name is to general and doesn't brand your company. This is for you to decide, but it is proven at least for now that the Search Engines use the domain name text in their algorithms of how they see your site's relevancy to the search criteria. Note: The domain name you choose needs to be available to purchase. On-Page Optimization - another important step of optimizing your website is optimizing the web pages that the user and the spiders see. For more detail go to: www.greatseosecrets.com. Now this is the trickiest part of SEO because you want to optimize your site for the Search Engine Spiders but you also want to optimize your site for your users/visitors. The best rule of thumb is to lean toward optimizing your site for the users first because more and more the search engines are looking at your site as if a human was, this is called Latent Semantic Indexing, optimize as natural as possible. So on-page optimization uses the following techniques:
Off-Page Optimization - As important as any of the other steps of SEO, Off-page optimization is key to your success. Think of it this way the search engines want to see how popular your website is to the online world. This strategy of off-page optimization is where you optimize your website off the pages of your site. Link Building is most important to the off-page optimization process. Link Building is where you get a link back to your website on someone else's site.