Essential SEO Tools & Resources

Following on from my previous post on Search Engine Optimisation “it’s not rocket science”, let’s now talk about how you should practically go about getting search engine traffic to your web pages and blogs.

Here’s the systematic approach I use:

1. Do your Keyword Research thoroughly
2. Write your own content, or rewrite any PLR content you use
3. Do the basics of on-page optimisation every time you produce a page
4. Get links pointing in to your pages and posts
5. Repeat

This system works! You won’t get an avalanche of traffic overnight, but over 3 – 12 months if you apply it correctly and stick to the plan you will see decent results! Sticking to the plan is the difficult bit for most people!

I’m a great believer in Mike Liebner’s catchphrase “Words = Money” (Mike is the founder of Article Underground).

What he means by “words = money” is that you need content to make money. So in the whole process, the most important task is to actually “publish content”. Content is at the heart of everything you do.

Write your content first, then worry about search engine optimisation once you have something to optimise!

That’s why the first two steps in my SEO system are all about content creation.

If you want to pull in free traffic from the search engines, the most important thing you must do, is do some thorough keyword research before you start worrying about writing content or search engine optimisation.

Initially, whilst you get your site established, you want to be targeting low competition keywords that are easy to rank for. At least these will bring you some traffic, even if it’s not an avalanche.

Put together a list of 50 – 100 low competition keywords as your starting point. In my next post I’ll go through the keyword research process in detail.

Once you have your list of keywords you need to create your content. I would suggest you write one or two articles every day, each article focused around a keyword phrase in your list.

I would use Wordpress which is free, or XSitePro II to actually publish your articles. Wordpress is a blogging platform whereas XSitePro creates a standard static web site structure. Both allow you to actually publish your content at pre-defined future dates, so with either platform, you can schedule your articles to appear on your site every day, even if you write several at one time. The search engines love to see regular new content appearing on your sites.

Every, article should include the minimum on-page optimisation. Your targeted keyword phrase should be included in:

- Your Page Title
- Your Article Title
- Your first paragraph (preferably the first line)
- Image descriptions
- Your Final paragraph
- Your content body several times, don’t over do it!

And that’s as much as I tend to worry about on-page optimisation! The “must do” is having your keyword phrase in your page title. In terms of on-page optimisation, your page title is the most important place for making sure your keyword is placed.

For very uncompetitive keywords, the above on-page optimisation may be enough to get your article content ranked well.

It’s important as you add your content, to start getting some inbound links to each page as well as your homepage. You don’t have to spend hours on it to begin with, after all with the keywords selected you won’t need that many to rank well. Collecting just one or two links for every article posted would gain you 50 – 200 inbound links in the first few months! Only getting inbound links at this speed also looks more natural to the search engines than having 100 appear overnight. Natural linking patterns is good as far as the search engines are concerned.

Once you’ve added your first 50 – 100 posts or pages, based on your list of uncompetitive keywords, you’re ready to repeat the process for another 50 – 100 keywords. This time around, choose some more competitive keywords that will bring you more traffic than the first batch.

Again try and write one article a day, or at least 3 to 4 per week. As before, write as many of the articles as possible yourself, rather than relying on PLR content. At this stage you’re now writing fewer articles per week than you were to start with. Use the released time to concentrate on getting a higher volume of links in to your pages, to give you a better chance of ranking well for the more competitive keywords you’re now focusing on.

This cycle keeps repeating. As you gradually target the more competitive, higher traffic keywords, you’ll need to write fewer articles per week, but concentrate on building more inbound links.

Within 12 months, if you’re disciplined and focus on your plan, you should have between 150 and 300 posts or pages on your site, with several hundred links pointing at them. This combination should bring you at least several hundred visitors per day. In addition, if you create and use RSS feeds in the right way, this number should be increased significantly!

Imagine how much you could make through affiliate marketing and adsense revenues with several hundred visitors per day?

The problem is most people get side tracked and distracted, and don’t have the patience to spend months writing content for their sites … they want success in days! It’s highly unlikely that is going to happen, and that’s why so many people fail.

My next post will focus on Keyword Research, then after that I will publish several posts on “off-page” search engine optimisation, in other words, how to get inbound links that will rank your pages highly!

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