SEO in a Nutshell
Research Current Website
Keyword Research
Analyze Current Website Linking
Analyze Competition
Link Building
Create Website
Set up Web Statistics
Monitor and Upkeep
Research Current Website
You should research your own website to use as a starting point and to set goals for your website. By examining the current ranking and number of links you have already, you can monitor if they increase over time.
Also, you should look over your web site for any intentional/unintentional black hat techniques on your web site such as hidden text, duplicate content, small text, page redirects (when used as doorway pages), keyword stuffing, doorway pages (pages designed for the search engines that the visitor does not even see), link farming (unnatural way of obtaining a large amount of links), etc.
By examining your website visitors' habits, you can discover where they go and for how long to see if they match the goals you set up for your website such as directing them to go to a certain page to download a pamphlet.
Keyword Research
Keyword research needs to be done to get a list of keywords that are searched for often, relevant to your site, and are low in competition. This is done by using the following methods:
For keywords, it is time to do a brain storming session and try to pick out keywords that are relevant to your website. After you compile a list, you can start to do some research on the internet to see how they rate.
One way you can do this is by using search engine suggestions. If you visit a search engine such as Gigablast located at http://www.gigablast.com you can look at the ‘Related' or ‘Suggestion' list that appears. Gigablast is one of many examples that show what other people are typing into search engines that are similar to what you type in.
Another thing you should do is put together a list of keyword modifiers that are related to your search terms and use them in your text alongside your keywords. For example, if your keyword phrase is web hosting, modifiers could be Linux and Windows.
After you have a list compiled, you can research these words online through such services as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) and Trellion (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com).
After you deleted the keyword phrases that are not searched for often and are too high in competition you can analyze them further to help you choose which ones would work the best. Then:
Then compare these results to the information you used from using Wordtracker and/or Trellion.
We use a formula that we enter this information into to generate a ‘score' for us to go by, which gives weight on how important the data is. For example, we give more weight to allintitle compared to allintext, but you can ‘eyeball' the results and pick out the important keyword phrases.
Analyze Current Website Linking
You should analyze your web site for how the linking is by examining these factors. Then, you can use this information as a starting base of progress and to compare to your competitors' linking analysis:
How many links are pointing to you?Where are the links coming from?
How valuable are those links?
How are they linking to you?
Are they self-multiplying links?
Analyze Competition
To get ahead in the rankings and increase exposure, you should examine the competition that you have. How do they achieve their ranking? How do they achieve their high number of website visitors? This can be done by examining the following of competitors' websites:
Link Building
A link building campaign should be started that will concentrate on generating one way links to your website that multiply on their own. Reciprocal partners should also be considered if they are valuable enough. This is a brief list of SOME of the things that can be done to achieve this:
Create Website
After you have all the information you need from doing the above, you can start creating or modifying your website with these factors in mind.
Set-up Web Statistics
After your website is created and set up, you can monitor your website visitor traffic closely to help determine ways to improve your web site by:
Monitor and Upkeep
After examining the statistics of your website and its visitors' behavior you will know how to tweak your website for better performance by applying such changes as:
Of course, much more detail and tips could have been added to this article, but it would have been in book form instead of ‘in a nutshell'! Through experience, you will be able to tell what methods work best for what type of websites, because what holds true for one type of website does not hold true to all other websites.