If you’ve ever been handed a list of 100 keywords and been told, “I want these on Page 1,” you already know the importance of SEO strategy. How on earth are you going to do it? Aside from hiring an SEO company, you’re going to need an organized strategy — and lots of it.

1. Organize your keywords into themes: This is exactly what Google recommends with PPC campaigns, but the same principles of organization hold true. It’s much easier to handle three or four SEO campaigns versus 100 scattered keywords.

2. Sort by search volume: Let’s say you have four themes or campaigns, divided up neatly into 25 keywords each. Now you’ll want to sort them by search volume. From experience, it’s typically safe to assume that the higher the search volume, the more difficult a keyword is to get to Page 1.

3. Identify your core keywords: For each campaign, you’ll want to pick your core keywords. These are the big kahunas, the ones that will drive the most traffic to the site. We normally pick about two to three primary keywords to focus our efforts for content creation and linkbuilding. You want them to have enough search volume to warrant targeting them throughout the length of your campaign.

4. Identify your longtail keywords: You can do this by establishing a cutoff point for each campaign We typically use 1,000 searches per month and below as our criteria for longtail keywords, but this number will vary depending on your definitions and the search volume for your keywords.

5. Create content strategy: You’ll have to figure out how you’re going to target all four campaigns. Content is always a major player in this, but creating content targeting all these keywords will be tough. You’ll want to create an SEO editorial calendar and create categories that correspond to the four campaigns. For example, if your campaigns are targeting themes such as “birds,” “cats,” dogs,” and “horses,” you’ll want to create categories that match those. All the content that you create would fall in these categories and help target corresponding keywords.

6. Create linkbuilding strategy: Some linkbuilders are haphazard in pursuing links. It’s better to take a more organized approach in order to effectively handle potentially thousands of links for your site. You’ll want to take the industry research you’ve done, along with the keyword research, to figure out how to attack linkbuilding, whether it’s analyzing competitor links, conducting blogger outreach or submitting to directories. Read up on how to use editorial content as linkbait.

7. Monitor, monitor, monitor: This is probably one of the hardest things to do, especially if you have multiple campaigns. But now that you are organized and have an organized SEO strategy in place, it’ll be easier to keep track of progress. You can establish milestones and conduct assessments quarterly or biannually to restrategize if necessary.

Those are the basic steps to creating a good SEO strategy. Any other suggestions? I’ll be working on more detailed guides to each of these steps in the coming months. Feel free to add tips and review!

In the SEO world, knowing how to build links is one of the major aspects of a successful SEO company. Even with all the talk about quality over quantity, I still see our clients’ competition pursuing spammy links and directories nobody would ever think of using. Is it helpful for the searcher? Absolutely not, and I have a hunch that eventually — although nobody knows when — Google is really going to crack down on it, or change their algorithms so low-quality link directories no longer factor into the mix. The solution? Focus on the what’s best for all parties — use editorial content as linkbait.

If you, your web design company or your SEO company are having a tough time deciding what directories to submit your website to then keep reading. I’m sure you don’t want to waist money and I know you don’t want to get penalized or banned from Google.

Since today is the “day of 9’s’, or 9/9/09, we are sharing nine SEO tips that go beyond the fundamentals, since if you are reading our blog you probably already know that the same phrases used in the keyword tag should appear in the copy, the importance of having a constant stream of fresh content, and other basic SEO tactics. 

Yesterday, Search Engine Journal posted an excellent article by Matt Leonard about why (larger) companies need social media guidelines for their employees.  Now at SEO Group and The Ocean Agency, we have some basic guidelines, but ours are more along the lines of Zappos - “be smart about what you put on the web”. 

Paying for high quality links is not exactly uncommon in the SEO industry.  In fact, purchasing listings in a few high quality directories (Yahoo, Best of the Web, Business.com, etc.) is something we recommend.  That said, we do stick to the principle that the best possible links are ones that are free - you want people to link to you because your site features something valuable.

Every day our SEO company spots missed opportunities online - in fact, one of the first things we do with a new client who has an existing website is to take advantage of any missed opportunities we come across.  Often, many of these problems are simple to remedy.  Here the top five missed opportunities we come across on a regular basis:

Optimizing an ecommerce website is not dissimilar to optimizing any other kind of website - you need to make sure your meta data is placed correctly, your copy contains your keywords, and all the other components that any SEO company knows are necessary for good rankings. 

Optimized press releases are a strong and effective way to drive traffic.  One thing that every company wants is fast results.  By releasing an optimized press release, your story can get featured on Yahoo News and Google News and be indexed quickly, and with the increase in blended search results, it could even place you onto page one right away, keeping your company at the forefront of your consumer’s minds. 

This topic was run past me a few times this week. It seems to come up a lot with friends, family, entrepreneurs, small businesses, corporations and basically anyone who trying to establish a web presence. Having ten plus years in the industry, I’ve formed some pretty strong opinions, yet I always try to stay open-minded. So if you have comments, I would love to hear them.