Use Google Webmaster Tools
There’s no excuse not to use this amazing tool. These are some of the things your can do with it:

• Submit a sitemap of your site so Google knows what pages they should index.
• Tell Google what is the canonical URL you want to use (site.com or www.site.com).
• Detect issues with duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.
• Find 404 error pages.
• Detect crawlability issues.
• See a list URLs restricted by robots.txt.
• See the most common keywords people find your site through.
• Get a list of links pointing to your site.
• Tell Google how they should index your images.

Steal Your Competitors’ Keywords
These are some of the ways you can do it:

• Look at the keywords they use in their title tags.
• Look at the keywords they use to link to their “money pages”.
• Some webmasters are dumb enough to include their money keywords in their meta keywords tags. Take a look at these but keep in mind that smart SEO people won’t do this and they might actually put bad keywords in the meta keywords tag to get other wannabe SEOs to use them.

Pay Attention to Your MozRank
SEOmoz has a tool called LinkScape that calculates your MozRank. MozRank is a great metric that evaluates the quality of your incoming links, something that most link assessment tools don’t do (they focus on quantity only).

If you have more links that your competitors but they’re ranking above you, you should take a look at your MozRank and theirs; maybe they have fewer links than you but they are BETTER than yours.

If your MozRank is higher than theirs, you have more links and they rank above you, then there’s probably an issue with the lack of keywords in the anchor texts of your incoming links.

Get a Double Listing
A double listing (or indented listing) can increase the click-through-rate (CTR) to the roof. How you can get a double listing?

• You need two pages of your site on the same page of Google results. For example, let’s say you have page A and page B. Page A ranks #4 on Google for “affordable leather shoes” and page B ranks #15 on Google for the same keyword. You need to take page B from position 15 (second page of Google) to position 10 (first page of Google) so pages A and B are on the first page of Google.
• Perform this Google search to find out what 2 pages Google finds most relevant to a given keyword: site:yoursite.com [keyword].
• Now that you know what 2 pages are the most relevant for that keyword (according to Google), use the SEO Rank Checker Tool to find out the Google rankings for those pages.
• Optimize pages A and B for your keyword. Link to page B from page A and vice versa using the keyword you want to rank for in the anchor text of the links.
• Get some keyword-rich links from external sites to pages A and B.
• Voilá! Your listing will look like this one:
  

Use Google to Get Keyword Suggestions
Start typing your main keyword in the Google search box and get ideas for keywords.

Fix Canonical URL Issues
If you can access your site by typing “site.com” and “www.site.com”, Google will see that as two different sites with the exact same content and that can hurt you a lot. You need to create a file called .htaccess with these three lines and put it in the root folder of your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.site\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Warning: unless you know what you’re doing, have someone else do this. All servers are configured different and you don’t want to mess with your .htaccess file.

What To Do If You Ever Get Penalized By Google
First of all, stay away from spammy tactics so this never happens. But, if you’ve been a bad boy/girl, this is what you should do:

• Find out why it happened. Read Google Webmaster Guidelines and find out what you’ve done wrong.
• Fix it.
• Ask Google to reconsider your site. Admit to everything and don’t pretend you didn’t know what you were doing. Promise that you won’t do it again.
• Don’t do it again!

Create a Google Sitemap
Use this tool: GSiteCrawler.

Learn the 4 Truths of Links

• Links from authority sites (e.g. CNN) are worth more than links from average sites (e.g. your cousin’s skating blog).
• Links from relates sites are worth more than links from unrelated sites.
• Links with your keyword in the anchor text are worth more that links that say “click here” or “read more”.
• Link quality is WAY more important than link quantity.

Once in a while someone asks me “are directories still helpful for SEO?” My answer is always the same: “it depends. If you’re talking about low-quality directories (a.k.a. link farms), don’t waste your time with them. However, there are still some great directories out there.”

What Makes These Directories So Special?

• Because the directories I’m about to mention aren’t free, 95% of the webmasters stay away from them. That makes these directories a lot more exclusive and links from these sites a lot more valuable to you.
• The other reason these directories are so good is that real humans review the submissions they get and approve/decline requests manually, based on the quality of the sites they review. Because they only add quality sites to their indexes, links from these directories are worth A LOT more than links from spammy directories.
• Not only are these directories good for SEO, but they can also drive very qualified traffic to your site.

Show Me the List!
OK, here it goes:

• Yahoo! Directory - $299/year
• DMOZ - This is the only free directory on the list. Submit your site to it and move on. They can take months (if ever) to approve your listing.
• Business.com - $299/year
• Best of the Web - $149.95/year
• Best of the Web Blogs - $75/year
• Gimpsy - $49, one-time fee
• Skaffe - $44.99, one-time fee
• WOW Directory - $43, one-time fee
• Aviva - $49.95/year
• GoGuides - $69.95, one-time fee
• Starting Point - $99/year
• Web Beacon - $39.99, one-time fee
• JoeAnt - $39.99, one-time fee

Link Building Tool #1: Link Diagnosis
Excellent tool to evaluate your incoming links and the incoming links of your competitors. By far, my favorite link building tool.

Link Building Tool #2: Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Not really a link building tool, but a great tool to find broken links on your site, 404 error pages and duplicate meta descriptions and page titles.

Link Building Tool #3: SEOMoz LinkFinder
Amazing free tool to find link building opportunities all over the web.

Link Building Tool #4: Majestic SEO
Another great competitive link intelligence tool that I use all the time.

Link Building Tool #5: SEOMoz Open Site Explorer
A much better alternative to Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Link Building Idea #1: Ask Business Partners
I’m sure you know a lot of people with websites and/or blogs. Ask these people to link to you! It doesn’t get any easier than this. These are some possible link sources: customers, vendors, co-workers, employees, business partners, relatives and friends.

Link Building Idea #2: Organize Events and Charities
People love supporting good causes and you can get a lot of links this way.

Link Building Idea #3: Give Awards
Organize contests and give the winners badges to put on their sites. These badges will naturally link to your site.

Link Building Idea #4: Get Links from Sites that Mention You
Sometimes websites mention you or your company but they don’t link to your site. Sometimes they even include your URL but it’s not clickable (not a link). Use the SEOMoz LinkFinder to find these sites and ask the webmasters to include a link to your website.

Link Building Idea #5: Ask Past Linkers to Link to You Again
Keep a list of people that link to your content and let them know when you have more similar content. If they linked to you in the past, they’re very likely to link to you again.

If you’re not in the local listings, you’re leaving a lot of business on the table. It’s free, it’s easy and it’s fast.

Where Should You Get Your Company Listed?

Google Local
Yahoo! Local
Bing Local
InfoUSA
Yellow Pages
Localeze
Yelp
Acxiom (via UniversalBusinessListing.org)

Some Tips to Make Your Ads Appear Above Your Competitors’

• Add your location and the keywords you want to rank for in the title tags of your website pages. They should look something like “Janitor in Atlanta, GA”, “Atlanta Janitorial Services”, etc.
• Include the legal name of your business in the title tag of your contact page.
• Use a local phone number (same area code as the city you want to rank for) and avoid toll free numbers.
• Use physical addresses instead of PO boxes if possible.
• Use your keywords several times in your local listings (in the title, description, categories, tags, etc.)
• Complete your local listing profiles as much as you can. Add business information, website, photos, videos, etc.
• Some local search engines allow you to add coupons. Take advantage of this.
• Include full contact information in your website footer and on your contact page. Include a physical address and make sure it matches the one in your local listings.
• Some people say that locations closer to downtown are more likely to rank above other listings. I haven’t seen proof of this, but if you have multiple addresses, use the one closer to downtown.
• Don’t submit your listing more than once. Duplicate entries can get you in trouble.

I’ve been working on an SEO book for the last 8 months. I finished it the last day of 2009 and we launched it today. I wrote it for entrepreneurs and business owners, not IT geniuses, because I wish there had been a guide like this one when I got started.

The e-book has been published by StartupNation, the biggest entrepreneurship community on the web and you can find more information about it here: Google SEO Book.

This is what you’ll learn in my book:

• How to find the perfect keywords for your SEO campaigns.
• How to analyze your competition and discover what areas of SEO you need to work on to make it to the top of Google.
• How to create a website that Google loves.
• How to create content that wows your visitors and makes them want to come back for more and tell all their friends about you.
• How to get high-quality links with very little effort (HINT: it’s not about getting a lot of links; it’s about getting THE RIGHT ONES).

A lot has been written on keyword research. This is the criteria I use to analyze keywords and decide whether they’re worth pursuing.

Do They Convert?
This is the most important factor to consider. Before doing SEO, it’s always a good idea to do a PPC campaign and test your keywords. I can guarantee that half of the keywords you choose by doing keyword research will not make you any money. Don’t waste a year doing SEO for them. Run a PPC campaign and see what keywords make you money before targeting those terms with SEO.

Are They “Action” or “Research” Keywords?
Some keywords indicate that people are ready to take action and others indicate that they’re just doing research. A person will start by doing research and then possibly take some sort of action. You want to attract people in this last stage. For example, someone who wants to buy a car will start by searching for something like “best cars of 2010″. They’ll find a few cars they like and they’ll do research on them. In this stage they’ll search for something like “Audi S4 2010″. Once they decide they want to get that car, they’ll search for “Audi dealership in Seattle”. That’s the keyword you want.

Do They Have High Search Volumes?
Obviously, keywords with a lot of searches are better than keywords with just a few. But, keep in mind it’s all about conversions. If keyword A brings you 1,000 visitors and 1 conversion a day and keyword B brings you 200 visitors and 5 conversions a day, you should choose keyword B.

Are They Hard to Rank For?
I don’t discard keywords just because they’re hard; I know that I can get a top ranking for pretty much any keyword I choose. But I do consider how much time and money it’ll take for me to get there and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense.

Current Ranking
With SEO, you see a bigger traffic increase from going from position 8 to position 2 than you do from going from position 300 to 12. Therefore, checking where I am in the rankings for each of my keywords is crucial. If I see a keyword in position 11 (second page) that is getting a lot of traffic, I know that by getting to position 10 (first page) I’ll see a nice boost in traffic. I use Google Analytics to check what keywords send me traffic and I check my current positions for those keywords. If I see keywords between positions 11 and 50, I know those are great opportunities.

Tools I Use
For initial keyword research:

• My brain (to come up with some keyword ideas)
• Google (to spy on my competitor keywords)
• Google AdWords (to run PPC campaigns and find keywords that convert)
• Google Keyword Tool (to come up with keywords and find out traffic volume)
• SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool (it’s a paid tool. This is a free one)
• RankChecker for Firefox (to check my search engine rankings)

In case you haven’t been paying attention lately, there are two parts to SEO: on-site (optimization of the site itself) and off-site (link building). Today I’m going to give you the same checklist we use to optimize websites. If you follow the steps in this guide your website will be very SEO-friendly.

Keyword Mapping

• You need to choose what pages you’re gonna use to target each keyword. You can target some keywords with two pages if you want, but make sure you don’t put all your keywords on all your pages.
• This is an example of a keyword map:
  

  Keyword	URL 1	URL 2
  tennis rackets	tennis-rackets.html
  soccer balls	soccer-balls.html
  sporting goods	index.html (home page)	sporting-goods.html
  affordable sporting goods	affordable-sporting-goods.html
  denver sporting goods	denver-sporting-goods.html	index.html (home page)

New Content and Existing Content
When you start SEOing your site, there are two things you’ll be doing:

• Optimizing your existing pages (optimizing content and tags for the current page topic. For example, if you have a page about “choosing the perfect football”, optimize the tags to match that keyword and optimize your body text to include that keyword. Don’t try to include your main keywords here; just make sure the tags are relevant to the pages content.)
• Creating new optimized content (chances are that after doing your keyword research you’ll realize you don’t have enough content for your keywords, so you’ll need to create one page for each of your keywords. Did you get that? This is very important. We’ll call these landing pages.)
• To summarize: you’ll optimize your existing pages and you’ll create one landing page for each keyword you want to go after.

Title Tags
What you need to know about title tags:

• Each page of your site needs to have its own title.
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to find duplicate title tags on your site.
• Use your keyword at the beginning of your title tag. If your keyword is “back pain treatment”, your page title can be “Back Pain Treatment - How to Treat Back Pain”
• Don’t stuff your keyword several times in the title. I usually use the keyword once and then a variation of that keyword (see the example above).
• Don’t go over 66 characters.
• Google will show your page title in their search results, so make sure you write compelling page titles that attract clicks. This is a good listing optimized for the keyword “promotional items”:
  
  Notice how it grabs your attention. The meta description has a call to action towards the end, which is highly recommendable.
• The page title has to describe the content on the page. As a rule of thumb, if people can tell what your page is about from reading your page title and meta description, you’re on the right track.

Meta Description
What you need to know about meta descriptions:

• You should put your keyword here but the main goal of the meta description is to attract clicks. This is a listing I like a lot (because I wrote it!):
  
  Again, notice how the meta description is created with the goal of getting clicks and has a call to action to invite people to click.
• Don’t make your meta descriptions longer than 160 characters.
• Each page of your site needs to have its own meta description.
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to find duplicate meta descriptions on your site.
• Just like with page titles, if by reading your meta description a visitor can tell what your page is about, then you have a good one.

Meta Keywords

• They’re not as important as they used to be. In fact, Google doesn’t even consider them. However, Yahoo and MSN still pay attention to these and they can be written in seconds, so it’s definitely worth doing it.
• Don’t put your money keywords here because this is the first place your competitors will look to steal your keywords.
• Make sure your meta keywords are related to the content of your page.

Body Text

• Include your keywords in the body text of your pages.
• Write for your visitors, not for the search engines. Don’t put your keywords all over the place and make your text unreadable.

H Tags

• “H” stands for headline. H1 is the main headline, H2 is the sub-headline, and so on. Use H tags and put your keywords in them.

URLs

• Each page should have its own URL.
• Use keyword-rich URLs.
• If you have a lot of content, organize it in folders. For example, www.site.com/shoes/adidas/arbolado-155PCX/.
• Don’t use session IDs or any other variable that can generate different URLs for the same destination.
• If you need to change URLs, use 301 redirects.

HTML Header
A page header is the first part of an HTML document. This is what a head needs to look like:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Travel Gadgets – The Coolest Travel Gadgets in the World</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”If You Are Looking for Travel Gadgets, STOP Looking! We Have the Largest Selection at Discounted Prices and FREE Shipping Worldwide. Shop Now!” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”travel gadgets, affordable travel gadgets, cool travel gadgets” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp,noydir” />
<meta name=”author” content=”Zeke Camusio” />

The robots meta tag is telling the search engines not to take your website description from DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory. The other lines are pretty self-explanatory.

Landing Pages
After you’ve optimized your existing pages, it’s time to create your landing pages.

• Create one landing page for each of your keywords.
• Optimize the page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, body text, H tags and URLs for your landing pages.
• Link to your landing pages from several pages of your site. Put your keywords in the anchor texts. For example, if you link to www.site.com/tennis-rackets.html, make the links say tennis rackets.
• Use IBP to compare your landing pages with the top 10 ranking sites for your keywords. Make all the necessary adjustments until you get an IBP score of 85% of higher.

Website Architecture and Usability
You need to make sure your website is “SEO compliant”.

• Use descriptive anchor texts (tennis rackets instead of click here).
• Images should have ALT tags (this has more to do with accessibility issues than it does with SEO)
• Make sure your text isn’t inside Flash animations or images so search engines can read it (use SEO Browser to check how Google sees your site).
• Avoid frames.
• Use DIVs instead of tables for layout.
• Make sure your content can be spidered (use SEO Browser and Google Webmaster Tools to check for spiderability/crawlability issues).
• Have your content organized. If you have over 20 pages, draw a map of all your pages and how they link to each other. Group your content so search engines can understand your website more easily. For example, if you have 200 Nike shoes and 200 Adidas shoes, don’t put all 400 links on your home page. Have a link to “shoes” on your home page, links to and “Adidas” on your “shoes” page and links to the all the Adidas shoes on the “Adidas” page. You can segment your shoes by sizes, color or any criteria you want.
• Send PageRank to the pages you’re trying to rank. This post explains how (look for “Step 5″). Make your links to irrelevant pages “no-follow”. Some irrelevant pages might be: privacy policy, terms of use, log in, shopping cart and external links to sites you don’t want to send PageRank to.
• Avoid keyword cannibalization (make sure you’re not optimizing ALL your pages for ALL your keywords. Choose what pages you’re gonna use to go after each keyword).
• Keep your code clean. Get rid of all the garbage code. Use external JavaScripts and CSS stylesheets to keep pages as light as possible.
• Run the HTML Validator and fix big problems. Don’t worry if you don’t get a 100% valid page.
• Fix broken links with this tool.
• Make sure there’s a 404 error page and there aren’t broken links on it (this is really important to prevent search engine bots from looping around your site).
• Make sure there’s a robots.txt file and it’s not stopping the search engines from crawling your site. Disallow sections of your website you don’t want indexed, such as printer-friendly versions of your pages, your shopping cart, admin area, etc.
• Create an HTML Sitemap and an XML Sitemap with this tool.
• To make sure Google knows where your company is located, enter an address in the website footer, have a proper TLD (.co.uk for the UK, .es for Spain, .com for the US, etc.) and choose your location from Google Webmaster Tools.
• Make sure Google Analytics is installed and all the goals are set up.
• Fix duplicate content issues.

Optimize Your Blog
Use WordPress and install these plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack
• Google XML Sitemaps
• SEO No Duplicate
• Target Blank in Posts and Comments
• Automatic SEO Links
• Platinum SEO Pack
• SEO Smart Links
• SEO Friendly Images

Doing SEO without doing a competitive analysis is like trying to fix a car without knowing what’s broken: you’re likely to fix what’s working and you won’t fix what’s broken.

A competitive analysis is crucial to understand WHY your competitors are outranking you. Once you understand the “why” you know what you need to do to revert the situation.

NicheWatch is a great tool that shows you the search engine rankings for allinanchor, allintitle and allintext (they pull the data from Google).

allinanchor: this shows you where you’d rank for a keyword based on links pointing to your site. If your allinanchor number is lower than your regular ranking (a regular Google search), it might mean that you don’t have enough links pointing to your site with the keyword in the anchor text. If your allinanchor ranking is equal or higher than your regular ranking, incoming links is not the problem.

allintitle: this shows you your ranking based on your page title. If your allintitle ranking is lower than your regular ranking, you need to optimize your page title.

allintext: this shows you your ranking based on page text. If your allintext ranking is lower than your regular ranking, you need to optimize your page content.

Let’s take a look at the results I got from NicheWatch for the keyword and URL showed in the image above:

This is what I can see about the website I’m trying to rank:

• It has 23 backlinks, whereas most of my competitors have a lot more links.
• It has 7 pages indexed, whereas some my competitors have 1000’s.
• My regular ranking is #55, but my allinanchor ranking shows a dash, meaning I don’t rank at all for this keyword. This is a strong indicator that I need links pointing to my site with the anchor text “Seattle painting services”.
• Same thing for allintitle. The keyword isn’t in the page title but it should. I can get a nice push from creating an optimized page title.
• My allintext ranking is 31, which is better than my regular ranking of 55, but still not that great. I’d put the keyword in the H1 tag of the site once and a few times in the page content. (I use the IBP software for this but you can manually calculate the keyword density of your top 10 competitors and adjust yours to be within that range. A word of warning: don’t obsess over keyword density; there’s no magic number. But, if the top 10 websites have keyword densities of 5%-10% and yours is either 25% or 0.1%, you need to fix that.)

By doing all this (optimizing page text and title, and getting keyword-rich backlinks) this site will rank a lot better for this keyword. It’s not competitive at all, so a top 3 ranking can be achieved within 30 days without too much effort.

Do you see the power of diagnosing the problem before treating it?