The SEO Business Guide pptx

Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors
Hey there!
If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re here to learn how to rank on the first pages of popular
search engines, get more traffic, and, ultimately, increase your revenue.
Ignoring SEO puts you in a vulnerable position.
If you rely on your website to generate sales, competing sites will outrank yours in search results and win
more business.
If you’re a web designer or developer, your competitors will get a larger share of the work because they’re
able to offer customers an important service that you can’t.
Without the essential knowledge, there’s also a chance you’ll be taken advantage of by rogue SEO “consult-
ants” who promise you the world and don’t deliver.
So, if want to learn SEO for your own business or to help your clients, there are usually two options.
Option One: You can scour tons of websites for free and paid SEO advice and tools to get you up to
speed. This option is okay if you have the time or money to spend sifting through the
garbage and scams out there to find what you need.
Option Two: You can invest in one high-quality product that shows you everything you need know
about how to benefit from SEO. (I might be a little biased, but this option seems like the
better one. Don’t you agree?)
If you have the time for Option One—great. If not, here’s Option Two (well, part of Option Two). You can
get the whole version later …
But for now, all you need to do is enjoy this sample PDF with three chapters of SEO brilliance.
I’ll chat to you again at the end!
Enjoy!
What’s in this excerpt?
Chapter 1: Search 101
In this chapter, we’ll give you a historical overview of search on the Web, explain how search works,
and begin looking at some of the most basic SEO techniques.
Chapter 2: Best-practice SEO
If you only read one chapter in this guide, this should be it: we’ll cover all the basics of ethical, best-
practice optimization step by step. You’ll learn how to conduct keyword research, develop a site plan

or hierarchy, implement technical optimizations, and build high-quality backlinks.
Chapter 5: Paid Search
So far, our primary focus has been on organic search results. In this chapter, we’ll take a detour to look
at its partner, paid search advertising. Organic and paid search are synergistic, and work best when
used in combination; hence, a strong understanding of how to run a PPC campaign will be a great asset
to you as an SEO professional.
What’s in the rest of the guide?
Chapter 3: Advanced Tatics
There’s more to SEO than meets the eye, and in this chapter we’ll dig deeper into some of the ad-
vanced tactics available to the skilled search professional. We start by going over some considerations
you should bring to bear on your campaigns, including user intent, natural language processing,
and link valuation. Then we look at some practical techniques for competitive research, and some
important recent developments in the world of search.
Chapter 4: Enterprise SEO
While the techniques applied are the same, optimizing a large organization’s website does come
with its own particular challenges and opportunities, and that’s what this chapter is all about. From
dealing with sprawling site architecture and tracking down duplicate content, to managing multi-
lingual sites and leveraging strong brands, you’ll learn everything you need to work in the big league.
Chapter 6: Local Search
Local search is playing an increasingly important role in the overall SEO landscape, with the major
search engines devoting ever-increasing amounts of space on their results pages to local results.
Optimizing a site for location-specific queries has a few important considerations that must be taken
into account, and we’ll highlight them in this chapter.
Chapter 7: Starting an SEO Business
Now that you’ve acquired a strong search skill set, it’s time to bring it to the market. This chapter
covers business essentials like developing your proposition, finding and retaining clients, special-
izing in a niche area, and developing effective reporting documents.
Chapter 8: Leveraging Technology and Staff
As we’ve mentioned, SEO is a process-driven discipline. This means that the best way to increase
your profits and grow your business is to manage those processes efficiently. Fortunately, there is

a range of excellent tools available, many of them free, that can greatly simplify your day-to-day
tasks. This chapter will look into a few of those tools, as well as some important considerations to
keep in mind when you reach the point where you need to take on staff to continue growing.
Chapter 9: Value-added Services
In the final chapter, we’ll look at how you can integrate additional services with your SEO offering
to maximize your revenue potential. The three services we’ll focus on are web design, conversion
optimization, and PPC management.
Appendix: Online Resources
Finally, we’ve compiled a list of the best online resources covering all topics related to SEO.
As you read, you’ll also notice references like this: “See the Search Contract file in this guide’s document-
ation.” These notes refer to the information contained in the Documents tab, and on the accompanying
CD.
The CD and Documents
The CD contains electronic copies of all the documents referred to in this guide. It also contains a
number of spreadsheet and presentation documents that are referred to throughout the text.
You can use the index.html file on the CD to locate specific documents by filename.
The final tab in the guide also contains printed versions of a number of these documents.
Email templates
We provide a slew of common emails to clients for you to base your communications on—from
“cold calling” a new client, to providing a weekly report, to a contact follow-up email—we have
you covered.
Presentation templates
In this business, you’ll often find yourself presenting to clients (or potential clients). We’ve included
a few templates of strategy and pitch presentations to start you off on the right foot.
Client briefing questionnaire
When signing up a new client, use a variation of this questionnaire to determine what the needs of
the company are, and what will be involved in carrying out the campaign.
Clean start checklist
This is a one-page checklist covering all the key bases of site optimization. Use this as your last-
minute safety net when launching a new site.

Site SEO checklist
This is an in-depth checklist of every conceivable aspect of site optimization. Use it as a road map
in your campaigns.
Interview questionnaire
Hiring new staff can be a daunting proposition, especially in a relatively new field like SEO. This
document contains an extensive list of questions to ask any potential staffer, in order to ascertain
if they really know their stuff.
The SEO Business Guide (www.sitepoint.com)
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Site audit template
This is a template of a full-site audit document: fill it out with the relevant details and present it
to your client as a summary of your research into their site’s current search performance.
Recommendations template
Use this template to summarize your recommendations for a client’s SEO strategy.
Sample search agreement
Use this sample SEO contract to cover the work that you’ll do for your clients, such as how you’re
paid and transfer of intellectual property, among other issues. You can then use this as a basis for
drawing up your own agreements (in conjunction with a lawyer).
Sample non-disclosure agreement
You should have employees and contractors sign a confidentiality agreement, such as the sample
provided here.
Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors.
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Preface
Search marketing, which encompasses search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC), is one of
the fastest-growing and highest-paid careers in the world. As consumers move online and away from tradi-
tional media, more and more companies are allotting significant funds towards their online marketing.
Google has built a multibillion-dollar business around search in just over ten years. On the back of that,
thousands of professional search marketers have started businesses focused on optimizing company websites,
ensuring that their clients appear in searches for the most profitable keywords in any given market.

SEO is an industry that has historically been shrouded in behind-the-scenes mystery. This is partly because
no search engines officially publish the “secret formulas” of how they rank websites. Unfortunately, this
left a lot of room for unscrupulous providers to use techniques and tools that were unethical and ill-informed,
leaving many clients with undesirable results. In this guide, we’ll be focusing on proven, ethical techniques
that give lasting value to websites to which they’re applied.
Search has evolved over the past four or five years into an industry with figureheads and industry rock
stars. There are professional search conferences every other week somewhere in the world. Companies all
across the globe are beginning to hire in-house search professionals. SEO is maturing to the point where
it’s now a well-respected discipline in the web development and design community.
Search marketing, and SEO in particular, has become an essential part of all web development projects,
and web developers who possess these skills have an immediate advantage over their peers. Being able to
truly understand and communicate the relationship between good web development and great search
rankings is a valuable asset, and one which clients increasingly understand and seek out. The potential to
build a large and recurring revenue base that runs alongside your traditional design and development
business is massive. Each new web development project has the potential to provide six to twelve months
of ongoing SEO work.
You’re going to need to be patient as you work through this guide. SEO is a process-driven discipline, where
time management and accountability are almost as important as the skills you possess and the tools you
use. Learning these methods now will help you stay ahead of the game, ultimately presenting new oppor-
tunities for you.
Who should read this guide?
This guide is aimed at anyone who wants to learn the ins and outs of successful SEO, especially those who
would like to profit from their skills by either running their own SEO consultancy, or adding SEO services
to an existing web design or development business. While some of the SEO recommendations we’ll be
making are technical in nature, nothing other than a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and an understanding
of how the Web works is required.
We’ll cover not only the techniques and practices that help ensure a site will rank as highly as possible for
a given set of keywords, but also some of the important information you’ll need to sell your services to clients,
as well as tools to improve your processes and workflow, allowing you to squeeze additional profits from
your work.

Chapter
1
Search 101
Congratulations: you’ve taken the first step towards harnessing a powerful practice known as search engine
optimization, or SEO. SEO is the practice of improving a site’s ranking in web search engine results for
specific search queries, or keywords. It’s a skill that you can apply to thousands of different sites, regardless
of how comprehensive or minimal they might be. With the right amount of practice and a good work ethic,
you’ll learn how to do some amazing things using sound and trusted techniques.
Throughout the course of this guide, you’ll be introduced to concepts and topics that may be foreign to you
at the moment, even though you interact with these tools and services every day.
You will learn how search engines evolved into the complex, all-encompassing online resources they are
today. You’ll understand the underlying principles that ensure a given website ranks highly for a specific
keyword while others don’t. You’ll also learn how to run your own SEO business and help your clients
gain the greatest value from their websites.
We’re going to assume that you have little or no knowledge of the way in which search engines work, or
their history. We will, however, take for granted that you have at least a basic understanding of:
■
your computer (files, directories, browsers, and the like)
■
how to write and edit HTML
Although this guide will show you SEO techniques that apply equally well to all search engines—including
Google,
1
Yahoo,
2
and Bing
3
—these teachings will be based on techniques proven to work on Google.
Google currently commands roughly 60% of the United States’ search market, and up to 95% in a number
of countries such as Australia. So our focus on Google is a practical choice: focusing your efforts where

there is the greatest possible return makes good business sense. Just remember, as a rule of thumb, the
1
/>2
/>3
/>Google-specific optimizations you implement will have a positive effect across all other search engines;
that is because most search engines use the same basic formulas and signals to determine content relevance.
Search engines are constantly evolving and changing the ways in which they rank various trust signals—any
indicator a search engine uses to determine that a website’s content is trustworthy and relevant to a partic-
ular search term. But by focusing on ethical optimization techniques and avoiding shortcuts, you can ensure
that now and in the future your search rankings will endure without fear of penalty.
A Brief Overview of the Early Web
Search engines are such an integral part of everyday life that it’s hard to remember a time before they were
so essential. But it hasn’t always been that way: in the past, search engine results were often filled with ir-
relevant content, spam, and other kinds of malicious material. Results were also influenced heavily by
marketers with big budgets.
Before you begin your journey to becoming a search engine optimization expert, it’s a good idea to take a
look back at some of the key developments in the industry and understand how they helped shape the way
in which search engines work today.
After Tim Berners-Lee invented what we know today as the World Wide Web using hypertext markup
language (or HTML) in 1991, the very first online robot—the World Wide Web Wanderer—was launched
in June 1993. Its initial task was to measure the growth of the Internet, where it actively counted the number
of servers connected to the Web. The role of this first robot was quickly expanded to capture actual URLs,
and the database it constructed was known as Wandex.
The very first service resembling what would today be called a search engine—named the Repository-Based
Software Engineering (RBSE) spider—was launched in late 1993. This was the first site that allowed users
to search by relevance for content it had indexed while crawling the Internet.
Then, in 1994, a name that’s likely to be more familiar to you entered the landscape, when David Filo and
Jerry Yang created the Yahoo Directory. In the beginning, Yahoo was just a collection of Jerry and David’s
favorite links; as the list grew, they added functionality that allowed users to search the database of sites.
The Birth of Search Engines as We Know Them

In early 1994, the first real search engine—which included a spider that crawled entire websites and indexed
them according to relevance—was born. This step forward in search and indexing technology preempted
the launch of many innovative search engines that year. Among the newcomers were Lycos, Infoseek, and
AltaVista.
The mid to late ‘90s saw a rapid expansion of the Web, with millions and millions of pages of content being
created and indexed by search engines. By late 1996, Lycos had already indexed some 60 million pages of
content.
The rapid growth of online content led to the emergence of a much greater problem with all search engines:
the relevance of the results returned for keyword searches. A simple search algorithm would work sufficiently
well with a database of 10,000 documents, but trying to return the most relevant site out of an index of 100
million documents was another story altogether.
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Google Is Launched by Sergey Brin and Larry Page
In early 1996, two PhD students at Stanford University began collaborating on a search engine they called
BackRub. The difference between their project and other search engines of the day was that BackRub used
a unique technique: analyzing the backlinks pointing to a website to determine its relevance for a particular
search query.
Citation notation—common in academia—was the underlying concept behind BackRub’s ranking engine.
If one source is cited frequently by other documents, it usually means that it’s more important and relevant.
On the Internet, a backlink is, in effect, a citation.
During 1998, these two enterprising engineering students launched Google. This new search engine was
built around a technology they dubbed PageRank, which was based on BackRub’s ranking engine.
By the year 2000, Google was powering the searches for AOL, Yahoo, and various other major online pro-
viders. The company had raised over $25 million in funding, and had come to essentially dominate the
search engine landscape.
The Missing Link: Making Money from Search
During 2000, Google launched what would grow to power its phenomenal growth and allow it to expand
to markets as broad as books, video, news, and maps. AdWords, as it was called, was a service that sold
ads on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis; by 2002 it had evolved into the current model, which places ads

using a cost-per-click (CPC) auction system.
AOL chose Google to provide its paid search functionality, which it ran alongside relevant search results,
in early 2002. This marked a turning point in Google’s history: until then, the company had been growing
quickly, but had yet to tackle the paid search market, which had up to that point been dominated by a
company called Overture.
Search in 2003 and Beyond
Since 2003, all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Overture, and Microsoft’s Live Search (now
Bing), have maintained the same underlying business model: indexing web page content, and serving ads
alongside search results.
Major search engines all employ the same basic page layout, with search refinement options on the left,
site listings in the middle, and paid ads across the top and right-hand side of the page.
The difference between the major search engines that existed in 2003 and those we have in 2010 is the
underlying algorithms that are used to index and rank content according to relevance. Google’s superior
technology and matching techniques are the major reasons why it has captured the most significant share
of the worldwide search market.
Search engine algorithms rely on scale, and on machine learning to adapt to market changes and understand
various nuances within specific niches. For example, a good search algorithm will attempt to understand
the meaning of a phrase and its context, rather than just search for the frequency of a given keyword.
Moreover, the more people search for a given phrase, the more visitor interactions can be recorded by the
search engine. The engine can then learn which kinds of results are more relevant for particular phrases
and categories. This has meant that as Google grew faster than other search engines, the amount of relevant
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3Search 101
data it captured across a multitude of different niches and categories allowed its engineers to deliver even
more relevant and meaningful results.
The search wars of today are waged over relevance; paid search results are simply the ammunition that
fuels massive research and development budgets at search companies. Google continues to dominate the
search industry: in the 2009 financial year, Google’s revenue was just under US$24 billion, with over US$8
billion in profit.
Microsoft Starts Taking Search Seriously

Microsoft was famously late to the search party, given that it had total market domination of desktop com-
puters connected to the Internet. Microsoft’s first foray into online search was made through the MSN portal,
which launched in 1998; however, it was only in early 2005 that MSN stopped using external providers
such as Yahoo to power its search engine, and brought search technology in-house.
In late 2006, Microsoft launched its Live Search (Live.com), which was its first serious attempt at becoming
a player in the search space. This service never gained the traction Microsoft had hoped for, constantly
lagging behind both Google and Yahoo in relevance and market share.
With falling market share and inferior search technology, Microsoft made one of the biggest plays in the
history of the Web—an attempt to purchase Yahoo outright for over US$44 billion. Although the bid was
ultimately unsuccessful, it was the turning point that signaled both Yahoo’s decline and Microsoft’s resur-
gence as an online player.
On May 28, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, the replacement for the Live.com search engine, which has re-
ceived praise for innovations and for its content-type-specific results pages. At the time of writing, Bing
has roughly 12.1% share of the US search market, which remains lower than Yahoo’s 18.3% and Google’s
63.7% shares. While there are certainly other search engines, these are—at least for now—the three main
ones you need to concern yourself with.
The Anatomy of a Search Results Page
You now know the backstories of Google, Yahoo, and some of the other major online forces involved in
search. So, let’s take a closer look at the core component of a search engine, and our ultimate goal as SEO
professionals: the search engine results page (or SERP).
All of the major search engines follow the same basic layout and usability principles, and this is no accident.
The SERP is made up of the following elements:
Search box
All three major search engines place the search box front and center on the page, giving users the ability
to conduct more searches.
Search refinements
The left-hand side of each SERP features more advanced segmentation of the search results you’re
viewing. You can sort by media type (images, video, and so on), country, website, date, and other re-
finements.
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Organic results
Located below the search box are the natural search results or organic search results—those results
that have been ranked purely on the basis of the search engine’s algorithms, that is, on their relevance.
These results are sorted on the basis of each search engine’s specific algorithms, and the goal of your
SEO campaign should be to appear in the first position within this section.
Paid results
Sitting to the right-hand side of the organic results, and sometimes above them, are the paid search
results, or PPC (pay per click) ads. The paid search results are bid on in an auction system, and the
position of each ad is determined by a combination of relevance, the amount the advertiser bid, and
the ad copy used.
Viewing the SERPs of Google, Yahoo, and Bing—in Figure 1.1, Figure 1.2, and Figure 1.3 respectively—you
should be able to identify each of these sections of the page.
Figure 1.1. The very famous Google SERP
Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors.
5Search 101
Figure 1.2. Search engine results from long-term player Yahoo
Figure 1.3. Newish kid on the block: Bing’s SERP
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How Search Works
Search engines are constantly indexing content, and recording which site links to which other site, the
content that appears on each page, the tags and keywords associated with certain topics, and a number of
other elements. In all, there are hundreds of different signals search engines use to determine relevance—a
word that’s used to indicate how, well, relevant a given page is to a given query.
The search engine indexing process starts with the search spider. When we refer to a search engine spider
or bot (short for robot), we’re talking about one or more dedicated computers that have been programmed
to crawl the Web and collect all the information they can find, and store how all that information is related
to various search terms.
Modern search engine spiders have two distinct tasks:

Crawling is the traveling from site to site, and page to page, discovering content and links.
Indexing is the task of building a database (or an index) of keywords and phrases, the sites and pages that
are relevant to them, and the links between those sites.
The process by which a search engine spider works is illustrated in Figure 1.4. Within each site, the spider
will follow internal links from the top-level index page down through all of the site’s other pages.
Figure 1.4. How a search engine spider works
Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors.
7Search 101
Once the search engine spider has scoured pages, various bits of information are stored in the search engine’s
index. Some of those important pieces of information include:
■
the content and structure of each page
■
a record of all other pages—both internal and external to the site—that are linked to from the page
■
a record of all the pages that link to the page
■
key HTML tags such as the page title, headings, and images
This is a very basic list of the types of data that search engines index. There are obviously some very smart
ways in which they identify relationships between pieces of information and index websites, but for the
purposes of this chapter, those pieces of information are all you need to concern yourself with.
Once this information has been collected and stored in a database, the search engine’s proprietary algorithms
take over; each engine uses its own special calculations to determine how relevant your website’s content
is to a particular search term. These algorithms are the difference between a search engine that any program-
mer could write in a week, and the dominant search engines today.
The major factors that search engines use to determine a page’s relevance for a particular search query are
much the same now as they were in the days when Google first launched its PageRank technology; however,
they’ve become more sophisticated and complex over time through the ongoing battle for more relevant
search results.
Two key factors are:

■
the number and authority of related websites that link to the page
■
the relevance of the content on the page to the query
Again, this is a highly simplified way of looking at SEO, as there are hundreds of different factors that can
determine where a page will rank for a given search term. You’ll learn these over time, but they’re not the
focus of this guide—instead, we’ll be concentrating on improving your skill base with practical and proven
SEO techniques.
There is, however, one extremely important lesson to take from this discussion: external factors—that is,
those outside of your control—play a major part in any SEO campaign. These external factors will often
have a bigger impact on determining relevance than your content does. Building the best site in the world
will do no good if there’s little attention focused on these external ranking factors. That said, having quality
content with a unique perspective will influence other sites to link to you; hence, these external factors
are, to a degree, within your control.
SEO Techniques: the Good, the Bad, and the Iffy
When you’re starting out with SEO, you’ll be tempted to try many different methods of fast-tracking your
success. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of courses, gurus, and guides that’ll try to tell you they have
the magic formula for success. It’s a compelling offer.
But with SEO, as in life, there are no free lunches, and there’s certainly no real way to “Get to the top of
Google in 30 days!” We’re going to tell you right now to ignore any such offer you might come across: ulti-
mately, it’s nothing more than snake oil.
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To help you discern perfectly okay advice from questionable suggestions—and from downright reprehensible
misinformation—here’s a quick guide to the various SEO techniques and their credibility.
The Good: White Hat SEO
White hat SEO is the most ethical form of search optimization. Any practitioner who follows the principles
of white hat SEO will engage only in the ethical, long-term optimization of both their own sites and those
of their clients.
When you adopt a white hat SEO philosophy, the methods you’ll employ will follow the guidelines set out

by the search engines. The fundamentals of white hat SEO involve:
■
conducting thorough keyword research and targeting
■
creating high-quality, unique content
■
improving internal linking and site structure
■
building links from relevant, quality sites
“Well,” you might be thinking, “that sounds easy enough!” Sadly, it isn’t. Each element of a white hat
campaign is a time-consuming, grueling test of endurance played out over months or even years.
Time is measured a little differently in the world of SEO than it is in the email marketing or PPC universes,
both of which allow you to quickly test, enhance, and deliver campaign results. These tools are like Formula
One cars—quick off the starting blocks, expensive to run, and highly tuned.
Ethical SEO campaigns require months of effort, quite often producing little results. Think of white hat
SEO as being like an oil tanker: it takes a lot of energy to get moving, but once it’s moving, it’s highly efficient
and carries a lot of momentum.
What you need to learn to do from the outset of your SEO career is to think long term. You need to understand
that the return on investment (or ROI) of an SEO campaign will almost always be negative for the first few
months. There’s no shortcut to profitability. Without a long-term view of any project—and without setting
a client’s expectations accordingly—you’ll be doomed to failure.
Now that you understand these challenges, it is time to discuss the big advantages of adopting the white
hat SEO approach.
The long-term benefits start with peace of mind: you’ll know that now, and in the future, you and your
clients will avoid the penalties that are applied to sites that breach ethical guidelines. These penalties can
be severe—in some cases, all evidence of a site is removed from the search results! At the very least, the
relevance of the site is reduced, so it loses ranking position and, ultimately, traffic.
Discriminating between ethical and unethical techniques is relatively simple. Just ask yourself, “Does this
optimization improve users’ experience or understanding of my website, or am I simply doing it for an SEO
benefit?” Let common sense—and the user experience—prevail in every SEO decision you make, and

chances are you’ll stay within the realm of white hat SEO.
The Bad, and The Iffy
Everybody knows that feeling deep down inside when our conscience warns us that we’re about to do
something that’s not quite right. You’ll get that feeling if ever you stray into the less respectable areas of
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9Search 101
SEO. The rules of good SEO aren’t complicated—after all, we just learned what ethical SEO involves, and
it isn’t rocket science!
The techniques we’ll discuss here should be avoided if you’re focused on building rankings that will stand
the test of time. Many of these tactics will incur penalties from search engines if they’re discovered, and
some might lead to the site being removed from the search listings altogether. Black hat tactics—as these
are commonly called—should be seen as the mark of desperation: those that employ them do so because
they lack the skill and dedication to build a strong SEO campaign.
Buying Links
Search engines dislike being tricked into thinking that a website is more relevant than it actually is. That’s
why buying paid links from other websites is an issue: it can have an undue influence on the makeup of a
search results page.
Imagine what would happen if search engines openly allowed paid links without any punishment. The
company with the deepest pockets would always be ranked first! Fortunately for us internet users, search
engines do penalize paid links, so relevance is still the deciding factor in determining rankings.
Make no mistake: buying links is an extremely common practice. Chances are that your competitors have
tried it, or are doing it right now. But when those links are ultimately identified as paid, search engines
devalue them, and the site’s rankings will decrease as a result.
Duplicate Content
Writing content can be difficult—even on a good day. But writing totally unique, engaging content that
ranks highly in search engines is harder. There are thousands of online services that allow you to syndicate
content; in effect, allowing you to populate a website with content from another system without having to
write a word.
On paper this technique sounds like a brilliant idea: fill the site with content, because the more content,
the higher the rankings—right? Wrong. Search engines have sophisticated systems for identifying and de-

valuing duplicate content. This means that your website will quickly become little more than a repository
of useless content.
There is a place for syndicated content: news streams are a perfect example. Once again, though, use your
common sense and ask yourself, “Does adding this content provide value to my visitors?” If the answer is
yes, adding syndicated content can make sense.
Keyword Stuffing
If you discuss SEO with anyone who built websites around the year 2000, they’ll often have the opinion
that the more keywords you add to a page, the more relevant that page becomes to a search engine. The
practice is called keyword stuffing: stuffing the page full of keywords for the sole purpose of tricking search
engines into thinking the page is more relevant than it actually is. Today, keyword stuffing often makes
your page less relevant for a keyword, rather than more relevant.
All the major search engines employ extremely complicated phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page analysis
to every single site that they spider and index. Natural language patterns are analyzed, and keyword-stuffed
pages—which bear little resemblance to natural language—are devalued. It’s that simple.
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Cloaking
When a website presents one version of content to a visitor and a different version of the same content to
a search engine, it’s called cloaking. There are dozens of ways to cloak web pages, and quite a few of these
methods work very successfully, delivering high rankings for those web pages.
But make no mistake: cloaking is on all the major search engines’ blacklists. This is an extremely unethical
technique that will result in your site being banned completely from a search engine if your tactics are
discovered. And, given that your competitors are likely to have an eye on the tactics you’re employing and
can easily report you, discovery is all but inevitable.
Once again, remember the mantra: develop websites that are optimized for the users’ experience as well as
the search engines’ spiders.
Automated Link Building
Hundreds of applications and services on the market today claim to be able to develop thousands of backlinks
to your site for next to nothing. This sounds like quite a deal, but as usual, if it sounds too good to be true,
it usually is.

Using software or services to automate your link-building efforts is a bad idea. These systems work by
submitting your website to tens of thousands of extremely low-quality directories, whose sole purpose is
to receive submissions from automated software tools.
You’ll receive the 10,000 links, just like the software promises. However, what those selling the services
fail to mention is that one relevant link from a trusted website in your industry can have ten times the impact
of those 10,000 links.
Do the math, and it’s not hard to work out that your time is better spent focusing on quality, rather than
quantity.
How to Learn SEO
There’s no way to learn search engine optimization without actually putting what you learn into practice
and seeing the results as you work. During the course of this guide, we’ll often prompt you to do just that
and use the skills you’ve learned.
A fundamental tenet of conducting SEO is the mantra “analyze, strategize, implement, measure, repeat.”
Isolating Your Variables
It’s much easier to learn whether or not what you did was successful if you trial it in isolation from other
activities. There’s always the temptation to try to put all the techniques you’ve learned into practice at once,
but then you’ll end up struggling to determine what, if anything, had any impact.
The best way to experiment with the techniques we will discuss is to register your own domain name and
set up a website to use as a sort of guinea pig. But that doesn’t mean you need to waste time working on a
site that’s of no interest to you, and has no potential for return.
Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors.
11Search 101
Your Site Concept
It’s easy to stay motivated if you’re working on a project you love. You’ll get enjoyment from this guide if
you’re able to apply these techniques to a real website based on a topic you’re interested in.
Since this may be your first foray into SEO, it’s absolutely essential that you have realistic expectations.
Trying to compete for mortgage or credit card keywords is unrealistic at this point; there’s simply too much
competition, and ultimately you’ll learn very little attempting to apply your new-found SEO skills in this
particular arena.
Instead, think of a topic that you’re passionate about: it might be dog training, cars, hairdressing—you name

it! Now, think more specifically about a facet of that topic that you know or enjoy, for example:
■
how to braid long hair quickly
■
reconditioning a Commodore VL carburetor
■
training a Labrador to fetch a stick or ball
You’ll notice that all these suggestions are personal, and they’re quite specific. By choosing a personal,
specific topic, you can speak from your own, real-world experience, and engage users with your insights.
Finding and Registering a Domain Name
The domain name can play an important part in the search rank your site achieves for particular keywords;
with this in mind, try to choose a domain name that includes a few of the keywords from your chosen
topic. Some domain examples for the topics we’ve just discussed include:
■
BraidingHairQuickly.com
■
CommodoreReconditioning.com.au
■
LabradorTrainingTricks.net
All these domain names clearly communicate their topics and feature major keywords that relate directly
to the sites’ content. There’s no need to worry about whether the available domain names are .com, .net,
or .org—worry more about the domain making sense and containing relevant keywords.
Where possible, go for the shortest available domain that matches your requirements, and try to avoid do-
mains that use hyphens; long names, hyphens, and underscores (_) tend to be more difficult for users to
remember and type.
Setting Up Your Website
A critical step, and one whose SEO impact is often overlooked, is how and where you host your website
content. Most people start off by having their site hosted as part of a larger shared system such as Blogger
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or WordPress.com, but these services’ limitations become clear when you need to exert some control over

the technical aspects of your site; for example, controlling search engine access, or managing how your
URLs are constructed.
When you’re choosing stand-alone hosting solutions, you’ll need to consider factors such as the geographic
location of the data center in relation to your target audience, server speed, server availability and/or uptime,
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and the operating system that the server runs (normally, you’ll have a choice between Windows and Unix).
Of course, your budget will affect some of these decisions as well.
Once you have the hosting sorted, the easiest way to start a website and add content is to use a content
management system (CMS); for example, a platform such as Joomla,
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Drupal,
6
or WordPress.
7
Choose
whichever platform you’re comfortable with; from an SEO perspective, these three have good default settings
and markup.
The Best Way to Learn Is to Do
Setting aside half an hour to an hour per day to work on your website will help you form the habit of arming
for the battle that is an SEO campaign. SEO is an ongoing process that never finishes: even if you do rank
in the first position for your chosen keyword, your competitors will always be trying to outmaneuver you.
So far, we’ve been speaking mainly of general search principles. But in the coming chapters, we’ll be focusing
on a number of proven techniques that you can employ to improve your site’s search engine rankings.
Ready? Let’s do it.
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13Search 101
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Chapter
2
Best-practice SEO
Traditionally, SEO has been viewed as a task that’s performed behind closed doors. This attached a certain
mystery to it, but allowed unscrupulous providers to overcharge clients for substandard work. What we’ll
show you in this guide is that adhering to ethical guidelines and keeping your clients informed at every
step of the process will deliver better returns and ultimately help grow your business.
Conducting a best-practice SEO campaign involves the application of a relatively simple set of ethical
principles. These principles will become the basis of your thinking, flowing through every decision you
make when marketing and optimizing a website.
There are four key elements to any ethical SEO campaign:
1. keyword research
2. content development
3. web development
4. link building
With an understanding and thorough application of these principles, your campaigns will thrive. By following
the processes and theories that you’re about to learn, you’ll gain the ability to rank highly in the search
engines, but the success of your campaigns lays squarely on your willingness to apply yourself. Your work
ethic and resolve will be the most important tool that you possess.
SEO is a process-driven discipline, which is the reason why the list above is numbered rather than bulleted.
When approaching a new campaign, you should follow each step in order. We’ve highlighted this process
because for too many years traditional web design has worked in the reverse order; this had an extremely
negative impact on an SEO campaign, ultimately hurting rankings and those of your potential clients.
The conventional process worked like this:
1. You design the layout and information architecture of your website.
2. You launch the site and wait for the traffic to start flowing.
3. You start to panic because there’s little or no traffic from search engines.
4. You hire a company to conduct an SEO campaign as an afterthought.

The problem with this method is that it fails to take into account that building the site based around con-
sumer-based search terms is an important part of the entire SEO process.
Throughout the next few sections you’ll learn how to conduct an SEO campaign from start to finish. These
processes can be applied regardless of whether you’re involved in developing a site from scratch, or not;
however, being involved in the site from the development stage is ideal.
Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research as the first step makes sense, because every decision you make thereafter is
based on the right base words and phrases. It allows you to see which keywords users actually employ to
find products and services within your chosen market, instead of making guesses at the keywords you believe
are the most popular.
Your first task with a client’s brief is to open up the first of many tools we’ll introduce you to: the Google
Keyword Tool.
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It will become your best friend when making decisions about target keywords for your
clients’ sites. Best of all, it’s free and the data is accurate. There are, of course, many third-party keyword
research tools; however, we recommend sticking to the free alternative in this case.
Instead of explaining the reasons behind the way this process works right now, let’s dive in and go through
a very simple example brief.
Example 2.1. Example Client Project
Client:
Bob’s Green Tea Farm
Website:
bobsgreentea.com
Brief:
Bob’s Green Tea Farm is developing a new website, as their old site is outdated and no longer relevant.
Bob wants more people viewing his website, and to sell more tea directly to his site visitors. He wants
to rank for the search term “green tea.”
Goal:
To market the diverse range of green tea products available directly from the site, and to promote local
tours of the farm, which show people how tea is grown, processed, and packaged.

Your first action should be to review the site and ask yourself a simple question. What are the three most
distinctive keywords you’d use to describe this site if you were explaining it to a friend or colleague? In
this case, we’d recommend the phrase “green tea” as a good starting point.
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The following recommendations are based on the assumption that you lack access to the previous website’s
statistics and data.
Open up the Google Keyword Tool and conduct some initial research on the phrase “green tea.” Since Bob
is based in the USA, choose USA from the Locations and Languages box in the Advanced options drop-down
menu. It’s important to remember to set a location whenever you’re conducting keyword research. The
keywords for each topic will vary greatly from region to region based on seasonality, colloquialisms, and
other factors. If you’re conducting a global campaign, you should choose All Countries in this section.
As shown in Figure 2.1, let’s leave All keyword ideas checked at this point; we’ll come back to these options
later in your keyword research.
Figure 2.1. The Google Keyword Tool
Once you’ve set the variables, click on Search in the bottom corner. You should now be staring at a list
similar to the one shown in Figure 2.2.
Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors.
17Best-practice SEO
Figure 2.2. Google keyword ideas
This list is sorted by Relevance as a default. As you can see, it has some key information in the columns to
the right of each keyword. Let’s focus on Global Monthly Searches for the sake of our initial keyword research.
Click on that column’s heading and it will re-sort the keywords by volume, from highest to lowest.
Now that you have your initial keyword list, you can further refine it by changing the Match Types in the
left-hand sidebar of the keyword tool, as shown in Figure 2.3.
Figure 2.3. Match types in the Keyword Tool
There are three keyword match types: broad match, exact match, and phrase match.
Broad match
The most common method of how searches are conducted, this is when the words are entered in the

search box without refinements, and the returned results are based on any order or distribution. If you
were looking at the broad match volume for the term “tennis shoes” (for example), the data associated
with this keyword would also include the keywords “tennis,” “shoes,” and many other relevant vari-
ations, which can be anything topically related.
Exact match
Exact match will show you volumes only for the exact search term you’ve entered. In our tennis shoes
example, we’d see volumes for “tennis shoes” only, and no other combinations or variations.
Phrase match
Using the example of ”tennis shoes,” phrase matching would show volumes for phrases such as “red
tennis shoes” and “buy tennis shoes,” because they include your phrase in the order you entered it.
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The SEO Business Guide18
However, terms like “tennis and basketball shoes” would be excluded, because they don’t include the
exact phrase in the exact order you entered.
When using the keyword tool throughout this guide, we’ll focus on looking at exact match targeting of
keywords. This will allow you to gain a better idea of the organic search volume specific to the chosen
keywords. Deselect Broad, and select [Exact]. The list of keywords in the main panel—and their
volumes—should have now updated.
In front of you now should be a list of the most popular keywords related to green tea, sorted by search
volume. Let’s focus on the top ten only for the moment, as shown in Figure 2.4.
Figure 2.4. Google popular keywords for “green tea”
Without having done anything more than enter a single search term into the keyword tool, this simple
keyword list provides enormous insight into the product and website. Let’s ignore Competition and Search
Trends for the moment and focus on the Local Monthly Searches; this column shows us the number of searches
for each specific keyword within the region we chose—the USA.
Based on this list, you can instantly see that some of the secondary keywords receive a significant amount
of searches each month. These keywords should be included in our content strategy and within our overall
site planning. For the sake of focusing on basic keyword research—and because the top ten keywords listed
are all highly relevant to our client’s site—let’s take these and make them the focus of our example SEO
strategy.

An important point to remember when choosing keywords is that the context in which a visitor uses a
keyword is just as important as the volume of searches.
Example 2.2. Example Search Terms
Say, for instance, that your client wanted to rank for the search term “cars” when they’re selling used
Subarus. A quick search on any search engine—or just common sense—is enough to see that visitors
searching for the term “cars” are unlikely to be looking for a used Subaru. Rather, they’re likely to be
searching for general information on cars. Use your common sense when sorting through keywords. The
highest volume is often not the most relevant for your campaign. In this case, the term “used Subaru,” while
it might have a lower search volume, will likely deliver more conversions.
Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors.
19Best-practice SEO