Links pointing to your site help you to rank high on Google; we all know that. But what people may not know is that not all links are built equally. Some are a lot more valuable than others.

Rule #1: The More, the Merrier
You want to have as many links as possible.

Rule #2: Links from Authoritative Sites Are More Valuable
A link from CNN.com is worth more than a link from your cousin’s blog.

Rule #3: Topical Relationship Matters
If you own a dog training website, a link from another dog training website is more valuable than a link from a music e-store.

Rule #4: The Page the Link Is Pointing to Matters
Don’t forget that search engines rank pages, not domains. Try to get links that point to the pages you want to rank. That’s a lot better than getting links that point to your home page only.

Rule #5: Link Text is Everything
If I wanted to rank at the top of Google for “Internet Marketing Agency”, a link like this Internet Marketing Agency would be a lot more valuable than one like this one: click here. In fact, I’d rather get 10 links with my keyword in them than 100 links with irrelevant link text. When two or more links point to the same URL, it’s the first link in the HTML code that counts.

Rule #6: Context Matters
The text surrounding a link matters. So does the location of the link on a page. A text link in the first paragraph is worth a lot more than a tiny link buried in the footer of the page.

Rule #7: Internal Links Count
I’m always shocked at how many people use “click here” or “read more” to link to other pages within their sites. You have full control over your website, so why not make those links keyword-rich?

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Millions of people use Google every day to search for everything from “diabetes treatment” to “sporting goods store in Chicago”. Those people click on the first results Google returns. Nobody goes to the 15th page. This means that only the websites that are in the first positions get found.

SEO is a collection of tactics that help a website rank in the first positions of Google for search terms that describe their business. For example, an Italian restaurant in Seattle will really benefit from being #1 on Google for search terms like “Seattle Italian restaurant”, “Italian restaurant in Seattle”, etc.

Does Your Business Really Need SEO?
SEO is a marketing tactic. You should only do SEO if it makes you more money than it costs you, right? To figure out if your business needs SEO, you need to find out how many people are searching for what you sell.

You can use the Google Keyword Tool to find this out.

Let’s work with the example we mentioned before: the Italian restaurant in Seattle. According to Google, all the variations of “Italian restaurant in Seattle” combined have over 14,000 searches per month.

According to the most recent data, the website that is #1 on Google gets 56% of the clicks, which in this case is about 7,800 clicks. Just to be on the safe side of the forecast, I always like to assume that a company can get only half of these clicks. So, let’s say you only get 3,900 visitors a month.

Now, how many of these visitors will make a reservation at your restaurant? Does 5% sound reasonable considering that these people were looking for an Italian restaurant in Seattle and they found yours? This would result in 195 reservations per month. Let’s say your average profit per reservation is $50. Being at the top of Google can bring you $9,750 in profits every month. If this number is higher than what SEO costs you, then you should move ahead and do it.

WARNING: It’s crucial that you run these numbers for your own business. In some industries SEO is extremely profitable and in others it isn’t anymore. This is because different industries have different profit margins, different search volume and doing SEO for some keywords is very expensive. Make your projections and find out if your business needs SEO or not.

How Does SEO Work?
Let’s say you determined that SEO will really help your business. How does SEO work, anyway? SEO has five steps:

• Keyword Research. You need to find the perfect keywords for your market.
• Competitive Analysis. You need to find out what areas of SEO you need to improve and in which ones you’re doing just fine.
• On-Site Optimization. You need to make your website copy and tags keyword-rich.
• Content Creation. You need to create a lot of SEO content for your site.
• Link Building. You need to work on getting other websites to link to yours (links are seen by search engines as votes).

I wrote a short step-by-step report that teaches business owners to take their websites to the top of Google. It’s FREE and you can get it here: http://www.theoutsourcingcompany.com/search-engine-optimization.html (scroll down a little bit and look for the report box on the right side of the page).

Imagine you have to drive to a small town you’ve never been to and you don’t have a map, GPS device, Internet access and can’t ask people for directions. It will be really hard, won’t it? That’s how most people do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They don’t have maps to see where they are, where they’re going to and how to get there.

Well, as you can imagine, that’s not very smart. I’ll show you how you can analyze your website and a lot of different factors to discover what areas of SEO you need to work on to be #1 on Google.

Number of Indexed Pages

Why It’s Important: You want the search engines to index as many pages of your site as possible.

How You Can Check this Metric: You can use the SEOQuake Firefox add-on to see how many of your pages are

Google indexed and you should compare your number to your top 10 Google rankings for the keyword you’re going after.

What to Do About This: If you find that your top 10 competitors have a lot more indexed pages than you, you should create more pages of optimized content. They could be blog posts, articles, resources or whatever your visitors want.

Number of Incoming Links
Why It’s Important: You want a lot of great incoming links.

How You Can Check this Metric: You can use SEOQuake to see how many incoming links you and your top 10 competitors have.

What to Do About This: If you have fewer links than your competitors, you should work on getting more.

Link Quality
Why It’s Important: Link quantity is important, but link quality is way more important. You want links from high-quality sites and sites that are related to yours.

How You Can Check this Metric: Use Open Site Explorer to find out who’s linking to you and who’s linking to your top 10 competitors.

What to Do About This: If your link profile is worse than your competitors (i.e. their links are earned based on merit and come from quality sites, and your links come from free directories, link farms and other low-quality link sources), you need to revert this trend. Learn from your competitors and emulate the good things they do.

Anchor Text
Why It’s Important: When you’re trying to rank for “sporting goods” a link like “check out our sporting goods” is much more valuable than one like “for sporting goods click here“. You want your keywords in the anchor text of your links.

How You Can Check this Metric: Use Open Site Explorer.

What to Do About This: If most of your incoming links don’t contain your keywords, start a link building campaign and get keyword-rich text links. Also, don’t forget that internal links are very important, and you have full control as far as how you interlink pages within your site, so be smart and use your keywords here.

PageRank
Why It’s Important: The higher your PageRank, the more link juice you have to distribute to your pages and get them indexed and ranked high.

How You Can Check this Metric: The SEOQuake bar can help you check this metric for your site and your top 10 competitors.

What to Do About This: If your competitors have a higher PR than yours, work on getting links. When external sites link to you, they pass PageRank to your site. Also, watch your PageRank distribution. Assign the no-follow attribute to links that point to pages you don’t care about, such as Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, etc.

Site Age
Why It’s Important: The older your site, the higher your chances to rank at the top. Especially on Google.

How You Can Check this Metric: The SEOQuake bar can help you check this metric for your site and your
top 10 competitors.

What to Do About This: You can always buy an older site, but you can’t change how old your site is. Even if you can’t do anything about this, it’s important to check this metric, because if the top 10 sites on Google are 15 years old and yours is one year old, you know that you’ll have to work hard in other areas of SEO to make up for being so “young”.

AllInAnchor
Why It’s Important: You need to know if your incoming links’ anchor texts are optimized for your keywords.

How You Can Check this Metric: Use NicheWatch. This is a great blog on how to use NicheWatch.

What to Do About This: If your AllInAnchor ranking for a given keyword is lower than your
regular ranking for that keyword, you need to work on getting links with
your keyword as the anchor text.

AllInTitle
Why It’s Important: You need to know if your page titles are optimized enough.

How You Can Check this Metric: Use NicheWatch.

What to Do About This: If your AllInTitle ranking for a given keyword is lower than your
regular ranking for that keyword, you need to optimize your page title and add your keyword to it.

AllInText
Why It’s Important: You need to know if your page content is
optimized enough.

How You Can Check this Metric: Use NicheWatch.

What to Do About This: If your AllInText ranking for a given keyword is lower than your regular ranking for that keyword, you need to optimize your page content and add your keyword to it.

Duplicate Content
Why It’s Important: Internal duplicate content can kill your rankings. You need to detect it and eliminate it. This is a great post on detecting and fixing duplicate content issues.

How You Can Check this Metric: Use Google Webmaster Tools.

What to Do About This: Write unique title, meta description and meta keywords tags for all your pages.

Website Architecture Issues
Why It’s Important: You need to make sure your website is built right and search engines can spider it.

How You Can Check this Metric: Read this blog post on on-site SEO and use SEO Browser to see your site the way search engines see it. Make sure they can spider it and follow your links.

What to Do About This: Fix any website architecture issues that you find.

Keyword Cannibalization Issues
Why It’s Important: When several pages on your site are competing for the same keywords, your rankings can suffer. You need to concentrate all this optimization on one page instead.

How You Can Check this Metric: Do this Google search:

site:yoursite.com “keyword”

Google will show you what pages of your site are the most relevant for a given keyword and will sort them in order of relevance.

What to Do About This: If you have several pages that are optimized for a keyword, pick one and from all the other pages link to that one page using your keyword in the anchor text. This is a great article on keyword cannibalization.

On-Site Optimization Score
Why It’s Important: One of the best ways to rank high is to take a look at the 10 websites that rank at the top, find patterns among them and replicate them.

How You Can Check this Metric: Although this can be done manually, it’s a lot more effective to use a tool. IBP is my favorite.

What to Do About This: Run the Top 10 Report on IBP. The software will give you an on-page optimization score and will tell you what you need to do to improve it.

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.

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.

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