How To Get Started With Link Building Research

One of the challenges for new and even well-established websites is to rank high enough in search engines to produce a decent amount of relevant traffic.

Drive relevant traffic

Consider someone searching “windshield repair” – they are most likely interested in pricing information, whether they should pay cash or submit a claim, the types of glass used and perhaps warranty information. They might want to know costs for having it done at a shop vs. on-site replacement.

The more comprehensive the content in terms of answering common questions, the more likely the search engines will rank it well, but quality content isn’t enough. You want to have links to your pages so the search engines can evaluate how many other people are vouching for your page.

The competition for some search phrases can be fierce, so outlining a strategy to ensure your site appears for the keywords you want is critical.

Link Building Is an Ongoing Process That Is Constantly Evolving

One of the most important items within that strategy is to acquire links to your site, preferably using the keywords your site is attempting to rank for in the anchor text. For example, if you want to rank well for “windshield repair”, your link building efforts would be to get links using those keywords in the anchor text.

But today, it’s all about quality over quantity. 1000 links from sites without much authority might not send you a fraction of what one link from a very reputable and authoritative site can.

Not All Links Are Considered Equal

You won’t make dramatic improvements in your site’s rankings by going after the easiest sources, such as profile links, or blog comments. So to make it worthwhile, you’ll need to do some research on what sites will bring the most value if you should be able to acquire a link from them.

In this post, we’ll share some tips on how to find the most influential link building opportunities.

Search Traffic Continues To Grow and Become More Competitive

Before jumping into the tips, let’s discuss why spending valuable time, and or hiring an SEO consulting firm to work on this task for you.
The competition between sites to appear on the first page of Google is increasing as more people do their shopping and research online.

You can review data from Google Trends to see if there has been an increase in demand for your most valuable keywords, and it’s a good idea to use the Google Keyword Tool we’ve talked about before to make sure you’re going after keywords that have existing volume.

Why Do People Use Search Engines To Find Information and Make Buying Decisions

The immediate gratification we get when entering as few words as possible to explain what we are looking for is extremely beneficial. It saves us time; it gives us what we want without having to wade through tons of irrelevant information.

With the abundance of information at our fingertips we’ve transformed how we navigate information. Quite simply, we scan pages in seconds looking for what we want.

Google Must Deliver What We Are Looking For Or People Will Use Other Search Engines

The ability for Google to remain the leader in the search industry depends almost entirely on it’s ability to provide us with the quickest and most accurate information as soon as we hit submit.

Google’s algorithm grades sites and determines whether it contains the content that would be useful to someone searching for information. But there is a big difference between having an ad that is on the first page of Google, and showing up on page one of the organic results.

Google can sell a single click for $50 to a business that sells car insurance.

That business can pay $500 a month for 10 clicks or it can earn a position in the organic search results and not pay a dime.
80% of clicks go to results that are in the organic listings. By optimizing, there’s another 40 clicks on the table that won’t cost anything if the site can rank.

Google Analyzes Your Site and The Quality of Information It Provides

The number of links and the quality of each link is part of how Google determines how well your site solves a particular search user’s query. The link represents a vote from another website, and it means the other site has a degree of confidence in the content your site provides.

Of course, the challenge here is how to attract more links and ensure that your site has enough to be considered an authority on the topic.

One way to identify a valuable link opportunity would be to enter the URL into a tool used by many SEO’s called Open Site Explorer.

Take note of the Domain Authority and Page Authority, those will be the two primary numbers you’ll want to be as close to 100 as possible.

The closer to 100, the harder it will be to obtain a link.

Use this tool, as well as other free tools, to analyze the value of a potential link.

As you become familiar with the phrases that send you the most business, you’ll start to see where the good links are available by looking at the websites you are competing with.

Create better content, improve the user experience, become more active in social networks so that your site gets mentioned by influencers in your niche, and study your traffic for indications that could identify more opportunities for traffic.

Here is a quick SEO checklist / SEO Exercise for car dealers – Tune-up your website’s SEO!

1. Pick 2 Cities that you want to concentrate on dominating search for.
(example: detroit & dearborn)

2. Pick 3 Keywords.
(example: ford, car, dealer)

3. Combine the city keyword with two of the keywords you chose to make your list of keyword phrases.
(example: “detroit ford dealer” – “dearborn car dealership” – “detroit car dealer“)

4. Enter the phrase into Google and be sure to leave the quotation marks intact.

5. Under the search box, look at the number of search results. It will say “About …. results”
(example: “detroit ford dealer” has 237,000 results.

This means it will be harder to rank on page #1 of Google but it’s not impossible if you have help   If your phrase has less than 5,000 than it shouldn’t be a problem to rank very quickly by following the rest of these steps.

6. Without deleting your keyword from the Google search box, click on the far left to type in the search box so you can add site=yoururl.com
(example: site:gornoford.com “detroit ford dealer”)
Now look at the “About …. results” again. If you do not show any results that means your site will not come up when someone searches that particular phrase.

This also means you need to do some SEO ASAP.  To start with, you will need to edit your site to include that phrase, preferably in the title and/or description tags.

7. Once you have added the keyword to your site it might take a few days for Google to reflect the change in the search results, but you should see your site showing up when you repeat step 6.

8. Now enter the following into the Google search bar: links:gornoford.com -”gornoford.com” and you should see sites which have linked to your URL. (This should work ok, but Google doesn’t usually show every single link so your results may vary.  A good tool for this is mentioned in step 9 below.)

If you have access to edit any of these pages, then try to add your keyword phrase once in the text. The best would be to make the anchor text link pointing to your site the keyword, but that may or may not be an option available to you, just depends on the site.

9. If you haven’t already done so, setup Google Webmaster Tools here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

This will help give you insight into a lot of information on how your site is performing, and it can be integrated with your Google Analytics as well.

10. Work on getting your site on page #1 of Google by creating high quality content on your site’s most important pages, such as your home page, about us page, staff page, service, parts, etc.

Take a look at your pages from a visitor’s perspective and ask if you think that someone is getting the information that they are looking for or if you are linking to another page that might give more specific information that would be helpful.

By doing these 10 steps your site will have a good basic SEO foundation and the ability to drive more organic search traffic to your site. The value in doing this is free traffic for search terms your competitors are likely paying anywhere from $2 to $8 per click.

Invest that into creating better content, and a better experience for your customers and you’ll be happy with the results.

When Do We Know Enough

Today I was wondering about the accumulated knowledge we obtain from searching Google or whichever search engine fits our needs. What do we do with it all? I would venture a guess that too much information is a burden for us but what if we refuse to go on an information diet?

Junk Content – The Triple Bypass Effect

What was that question? You know, the one you just answered sufficiently, but instead your OCD kicks in. Just one more tiny fact, it’ll be perfect and boom off you go on a information binge.

Drive through after drive through you can’t stop.

I’ll bet you want to run off right now, the last tangent you left off was just getting good.

Often times our thoughts will be generated by a single reference point, but the moment we send them out to find our information they multiply and in an effort to chase them down, we get lost amidst the temptation of infinite knowledge.

Our thoughts are like children, they should be supervised and given boundaries. They should also be cared for, imagine trying to take care of 25 kids at the same time. That’s insanity, and even though we might be able to raise them all, you’d probably lose your mind trying to manage them all.

Businesses, big ideas, are the same way. You won’t build a successful business without having invested your time on completing the tasks needed to bring in the dough.

Information is the new comfort food. Put that bag of chips back in the drawer, your meals consist of endless munching until theres crumbs left at the bottom of the bag.

Gathering information is like hoarding. It’s natural to really be attracted to information, but when you tote around a 2TB external HD to support your habit things are a little out of control.

Information is the fuel we use to go places.

Our minds are like engines that idle, some idle with a bit more RPM than others and thus they are ready to break the tires free the second they’re challenged by another driver.

The drag strip is where we put our engines up against the competition to see if our recent changes have resulted in an improved ET (elapsed time). Sometimes, we overdue it, add too many things and see our times have slowed down.

That’s when you have to shed some of it and get back on track.

Measuring Performance Gains in Every Change We Make

I came to a conclusion that acquiring information, without measuring the overall effect it has, can produce results that aren’t going to help improve our ET.

The ability to acquire information has become so instantaneous that our engine needs to account for it and either limit the intake of it or risk slowing us down.

In a way, too much information floods the cylinder and without modifying our tune we’ll eventually stall out.

Mass Production Yields Average Quality

Today’s vehicles are controlled by computer, which reads sensors and makes adjustments to obtain the effects it was designed to handle.

We don’t need to put 116 octane in a Toyota Camry, it’s not going to cause the engine to adjust accordingly and make more power.

Nor would the owner of a Toyota Camry necessarily want to deal with that kind of power, it’s beyond what they need and they probably wouldn’t be able to handle it anyway.

These are people whose cars idle at a lower RPM, they’re the majority of the ones who use search engines. Their the ones who have no idea what I do for a living, and would rather not try to understand it.

When you first experience that rush of power, you either want more or you want it to stop.

Custom Niche Quality Content – The Racing Fuel of Content

We want more, we want faster, and we want it now! Tell me it’ll take 15 psi of boost and I’ll run methanol injection to take it up to 20 psi.

Don’t tell me that’s all you can do, might as well join the rest of em at the end of the line cause that’s where you’ll be with that kind of effort.

Refining Your Content – Purify Your Brand

You want high performance you gotta work for it. Keep doing what everyone is doing and live in the bumper to bumper lifestyle or step it up and pass them all with a blip of the throttle.

Every Engine Is Different

We spend hours upon hours searching through mediocrity in the hopes that we might discover the finest and most pure form of content.

We’re trying to find the source, the original thought, so we can understand it from the perspective of the one who truly knows about the subject.

Sorting and Filing Is Exhaustive Work

As we discover information that we do not have a need for our minds explore the gaps we are naturally accustomed to want to fill.

Throw that away if you can’t use it. It’s hard to do, I know.

Our survival instinct is to keep good stuff when we find it.

Problem is we can’t necessarily store all that information, some of it’s gotta go.

Every Engine Is Different

You may have the same size engine, same make and model, but unless you break out the laptop and start looking at the data you’ll never notice the subtle differences in how one engine differs from another.

The point is, that difference may be small in the grand scheme of things, it’s the fact that we seek uniqueness and original thought.

In other words, we should do things we are naturally capable of doing and not what others are doing.

It’s where we see our real potential, and it’s where others see it in themselves.

Doing Good SEO Without The Proper Tools Is Very Tough

Performing SEO is one of the core responsibilities I provide to my clients. The work involved is very time consuming and tedious and often the client can’t even visually tell the difference unless they read the source, and keep track of their sites traffic. I end up spending hours of my time explaining what work has been done, why, and what’s next.

I’ve gone through many different styles of reporting and measuring the results from creating my own excel ranking spreadsheets, to building some custom apps that will help take some of the manual work off my plate. The struggle with this though, is the consistency, accuracy and professionalism that I was never fully satisfied with, and continue to search for reasonable solutions.

Keeping good records and having the ability to discuss in general or in detail, the current status or progress of a project, allows for meetings to go smoothly and questions to be easily answered. In having all this data, they can understand and appreciate the result.

Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager

I came across a great product called Advanced Web Ranking while reading SEOBook’s blog, and I have been testing it out the site ranking feature, along with Advanced Link Manager, and so far it’s been working extremely well, and will likely become incorporated into the many tools I use to perform and measure SEO work and the outcome.

Always Buy The Best Tools

I’ve always followed this rule. If I had an option for buying a tool that I’d need to use daily, or weekly, I’d get the best one I can find – because the result of time saved is always worth many times the price of the tool.

Testimonials and word of mouth carries so much more than advertising, had I seen an ad for this product I wouldn’t have even gave it 1 second of thought most likely.

Since they offer a free download I figured I would give it a shot and see if it could work. Thankfully they offer a Mac version, so I clicked download and it was done within just a couple minutes.

Trying Out Advanced Web Ranking

When I opened it they had the typical installation process, so after going through that the software was ready to go. I was impressed almost immediately by the way it was setup and how little it needed to actually run a preliminary test. I usually like to try an application right away even if its just one simple operation, that usually gives me an idea of how the rest of the tool will perform. This was off to a great start, after simply entering a keyword and a domain name it was pulling all kinds of great data in, competitors ranking, keyword volume, page optimization, etc.
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Then I quickly went to see if there was anything meaningful I could pull off the tool in a form of a report. It won’t do me any good if the data is trapped in the tool and takes a lot of steps to export it into a reasonable format. This also was very simple and the resulting report was something I could feel confident with in sending to clients so now it was time to spend a little more time with it.

Until now, I’ve yet to find any worthwhile software application that wasn’t web based to perform the SEO management I needed with the level of detail and simple operation.

Advanced Link Manager – Great Links Are Hard To Earn

Here was a tool that I really needed badly. Getting high quality links to a clients website is a manual and extremely difficult process if the links are from highly trusted sites with good authority. The report I had been looking for would show the current links, the anchor text, and would also help identify the competition’s link sources and perhaps a way to keep track of whether we are outperforming the competitions inbound link building.

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Link Building For Clients And Making Sure They Grasp The Importance

My clients are primarily car dealers who have websites that typically have very little unique or interesting content. This seemed like a good opportunity to offer a blog service that would allow dealers to build their brand identity online.

Great Content Draws Links and Builds Authority

Our blogs get awesome links because we publish great content, but we also need to measure this success and repeat what works.

Once again I try to create some type of linkbuilding log / report where we’d enter the source of the link, anchor text if applicable, and the date and perhaps some other metrics like page rank and Domain and Page Authority (SEOMoz terminology there).

The problem was that even though my attempt at creating the link manager was a good effort and I was sure to keep it updated, my same issues began to come back and I wasn’t able to keep it up. So it made sense to try Advanced Link Manager since it might be much better than my manual bookkeeping.

One of my goals with this application is the ability to send clients regular reports that really connect the dots and allow them to pursue successful campaigns and continue to out perform in their market.

Keeping Track Of Historical Results

Finally, one of the most beneficial aspects or even sometimes rewarding depending on the project, is to watch how the results of the work can steadily and accurately improve a clients site ranking. For competitive keywords its a matter of consistency and quality that keeps them on top, and identifying sites that are rising in the rankings is certainly important if giving up your top position is going to cost you revenue. The ongoing reporting that the Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager provide will be indicators of many things we can improve on the sites, from content gaps to errors and other types of issues.

So far I’m liking these tools so I am looking forward to getting more results and sharing them.

Google Shares Their Concept On The Process Of SEO

The Google Webmaster Tools blog shared a video about how they would start out performing SEO on a website.

Steps Required The Use Of Webmaster Tools

Do SEO on products already ranking and visible in search engines.

This step involved identifying which products were already getting seen and page visits from search users. A tab in WMT (Webmaster Tools) will show you search queries in which pages of your site appear.

*Tip – Star the search queries that get clicks – don’t worry about the ones with high impressions.

Don’t Go Overboard – Focus on One Product

If you aren’t too familiar with how to track rankings, traffic and conversions for specific keywords then you’ll want to start slow in order to fully see what effects your optimization has.

What Elements To Optimize On The Product Pages

1. Title – Leading the title with 3-4 important keywords and not overdoing it by repeating them over and over.
2. Description – Go to Google and enter this into the box – site:yourwebsite.com and look at the results. Do they look like something you’d want to click on? If not, rewrite them so they are, and look at your competitors (sites that outrank you).

Keywords in WMT – Do They Match The Product

The video describes how their site was first getting impressions in search for keywords such as organic – eco – cotton but those didn’t match the actual product as well as google – android – shirt so some changes to their page content would likely help in addition to the title and descriptions.

Duplicate URLs – Pages that differ only in their parameters(usually the part after the question mark)
For this, the ideal solution is to implement rel=”canonical” which tells Google which URL you want.

Parameter Handling – Duplicate Content

Use this setting in WMT if you have issues with dupe content – tells the bots crawling your site to ignore those pages that will essentially appear as duplicate content.

Final Tips

Fixing Your crawl errors
Prioritize Your Internal links
Link Pages With Other Relevant Pages
Try Out the Fetch With Googlebot
Improve Site performance
Speed – Load time – get it under 2 seconds

Related Posts:

• http://thedealerblog.com/seo-strategy-checklist-keeping-your-seo-process-intact-and-consistent/
• http://thedealerblog.com/seo-roadmap-5-checkpoints-for-seo-quality-seo-fundamentals-explained
• http://thedealerblog.com/on-page-seo-for-dealers/
• http://thedealerblog.com/search-engine-optimization-process-to-focus-on-ranking-factors/

When we do SEO for clients, the one thing we always want to ensure is that the work can be tied to a metric and today were going to discuss one of those metrics – Where to Locate Quality Ranking Factors In SEO.

How To Find Ranking Factors Within Your Content –

There are some very high quality free resources out there that outline the known SEO Ranking Factors – and its clear that its very highly dependent upon links to rank well for a given keyword or domain category.

What Can We Do To Get More Links

The average car dealership website gets the majority of it’s organic search traffic for brand related keywords. You can see this by logging into Google Analytics and looking at the Sources and Search engine keywords (non-paid). At the bottom, you can filter out any/all variations of the brand to see where additional car dealer website content can help improve search traffic. The SEO work should result in high quality – high converting keywords.

But what about links? All that was mentioned here so far was content.

The Key To Earning Links That Matter Is In Your Content

Since car dealers have been doing just fine getting a link from the local credit union, the BBB, and so on, the optimization for a dealers brand name should be in tip top shape for the most part.

Now, in order to get high quality links – from high quality sources – the only way to acquire them is to produce remarkable content.

Remarkable Content #1 Way to Gain Links

Since you only want high quality links from reputable websites, and those sites are fully aware that linking out to sites that don’t offer the visitor / user a great path towards information they’re seeking would be hurtful to their rankings – the final answer to this means you must have the ability to produce very high quality content.

Using some of Google’s Tips and Tools you can improve quite a bit with what you have before worrying about the content development process. The image below shows “Google’s Wonder Wheel” and it’s fairly easy to see why it would benefit you. Enter a search term and you’ll see some examples of what Google considers to be highly relevant information you may want to include in your content.

Measuring Ranking Factors And Changing your Search Ranking Guidelines

It would be great if their were a mathematical way to calculate exactly what you need to do to improve your ranking in search, but unfortunately this isn’t going to be shared by the SE’s any time soon.

Keeping your own search data and trying to identify which changes make significant change in ranking will help you dial in a great SEO strategy.

Is Long Tail a Good Long Term SEO Strategy

When developing an SEO content strategy and keyword strategy for your website, think about subjects that might have significant depth in terms of what people might want to know about a specific product or service.

The result can be a steady stream of organic search traffic about subjects that lead to new products or services you may want to offer.

The visitors on your website are expressing their needs through the search terms they are using, which are representative of the depth of knowledge they currently have on a subject.

When you understand this subject, the steps one may benefit from following in order to learn the product or service more thoroughly, might convert them into becoming a customer simply because your site was the one that gave them their first understanding of a particular product or service.

Automotive Long Tail SEO

You can see evidence of this depth using keyword research tools for free from sites like Seobook.com’s keyword

Heres a demonstration of the results for “2010 Acura”

This shows that the keyword combination of “vehicle year” combined with “vehicle brand” results in a list of long tail results of which themselves dive deeper into their own content categories.

When developing a longtail content strategy, consider the number of keywords that a tool like the keyword research tool displays and the volume of each of those keywords individually.

How to Structure the Content To Capture the Long Tail

Its not enough just having knowledge that a long tail exists, its important to use that research data to help structure the navigation, URL structure in terms of how a user may wish to explore deeper information.

Example: Someone who enters a search query for “2010 Acura”. The above screenshot shows that it would be most beneficial to someone who lands on that page on your site to be given the ability to navigate to several of the different models listed in that screenshot.

If you want to discover deeper long tail opportunities you might want to click on that “2010 Acura MDX” found in the keyword research tool to see which specific things are then of the most interest to viewers. We’ll save the deeper exploration for another post, but would suggest that similar processes for keyword discovery be used to create the most in-demand content which will earn links based on the quality of the result.

Why Automotive SEO Has Long Tail Search Value

Automotive subjects, whether they are about the vehicle itself and the components that make up the vehicle or describe the vehicle, make for a very deep search opportunity.

If you think about the manuals made for finding replacement parts, the very structure of a traditional manual is naturally an SEO goldmine if you think that your customers would be searching for this content.

Part number search in automotive is an untapped opportunity for parts and service business, and is about as deeply long tailed in terms of how part numbers represent specific parts for specific vehicles.

Where To Get Your SEO

Lets take a little SEO Roadtrip. There are the 5 SEO Checkpoints along the way that are important and should not be skipped. You’ll want to bookmark this for future reference – ie. this is a long post!

SEO Arsenal

SEO Log Notebook: SEO Goals – Notes – Ideas, for your records so be sloppy if you want.
SEO Status Report: Strict and Specific – Accurate Record with Direct Results. Be accountable in this report.
SEO ER – Get Help: Google Webmaster Tools
SEO Wallet – Keep Filled with Good Content – Just Like Cash: Original Content – High Quality – Unpublished Anywhere

Intro

Understanding and Using Your SEO Arsenal

You have many things to do in SEO, so in order to make good use of your time we’re about to move fast. Come back here as you move from one checkpoint to the next. Have your SEO Arsenal stocked well, you’ll be using it shortly.

I. – SEO Goals

Setting Reasonable Goals – Put Them on Paper – Logbook

Before undertaking a new project, it’s a good idea to list out specifically how the SEO Goals will be reached and what it took to get there so we keep track of that with an SEO Logbook and Status Report – Download SEO Excel File.

As you can see from the sample log, we need some things to track (keywords). But lets not get ahead of ourselves, lets first see what we expect to get out of all this and then determine if it’s worth it. The first page is the status report followed by pages that are the previous weeks rankings. Add your SEO Logbook to this spreadsheet for keeping notes.

II. SEO LogbookStart Gathering Data

Think of this like you might think about a bank account. You start with a balance and it’s up to you to use that balance to make more money. So begin tracking your efforts and what they have brought you back very methodically. This will force you to stick to the tasks that produce the highest ROI. Keep a close eye on the SEO Goal that you’ve chosen, and only concern yourself with that one for now.

How To Read The SEO Status Report

It would be in your best interests to make big gains in ranking, but you need to know where you are ranked first and what keywords you’ll use to track.

Pick 3 keywords and get your current rankings, paste that into the excel spreadsheet. Now go to SEOBook and plug them in. You’ll have to wait a few days to a week to get an updated report so the status report won’t mean much until then.

Also, for the “-” I just replace those with 999 so the subtraction occurs. A “-” means your site isn’t listed in the first 200 positions, or 20 pages (10 results per page).

III. Show Your Work – Log Changes

Take Notes When you make changes

Remember in school when you had to show your work? Thats the same here. You’ll want to keep notes along the way so keep jotting them down while you are doing this work. Every change you make to a title tag, put the old one down, followed by the updated one. You should do this at the same time every week so you can see the impact it makes on your rankings.

Ok, you got your SEO Status Report and Your SEO Log.

Advanced – Long Term SEO Milestones and Goals Identified

Selecting SEO Milestones

Without creating too much distraction, come up with 1 or 2 very simple SEO Goals you can feel confident in gaining out of this exercise.

SEO Milestones – What Metrics To Track As a Milestone

Lets say you wanted to improve your OnPage SEO. One way to test whether you’re making positive changes is to think about some of these ideas as getting clicks means people are engaged with your site.

Make Them Want To Click

Place links in test locations to see which ones get clicked the most
Put a box around your permalinks so people are more apt to grab it and paste it
Offer your own branded URL shortener to create incentive for them to create a link to your page

These are clearly all link related metrics to track as milestones. You may think that this isn’t SEO but it certainly is if you have an existing site with organic traffic that perhaps has some on-site issues that hurts your ability to rank. If you can’t get people to “click through” when you have 50 visitors to the page, won’t matter if you somehow magically appear at the top of Google and get 1000 because if all 1000 just leave then you’ve just told the search engines you don’t have anything to add.

What Is A Good Starting Point

The more broadly someone is searching for information, the harder to rank because of sites like Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is good for delivering information for people early in the the discovery, or information gathering stage.

Think of someone searching the word “Chevy” is “discovery or browsing” mode and searching “2008 Chevy Silverado 4×4″ is in “lead or shopping mode”

How Buyers Search For Cars

If users could actually expect a good result for “Used 2008 Chevy Silverado extended cab 4×4 1500 gray ls under 40000 original miles automatic $12000″ – They would enter it, but most likely they’ll be missing other opportunities because that is highly targeted.

We need to consider what search is going to bring us business, one that gets searched often enough to warrant the time spent doing the work to rank well for it.

Open a browser and enter some phrases into Google to see what sites come up and if any stand out more than others. Then take note of the number of page results in the index.

We may try “2008 Chevy Silverado 4×4 Pickup Truck” or “2008 Chevy Silverado 4×4 Pickup Truck for sale” if we regularly have that inventory.
Ok not bad, Google has about 735,000 page results and this will be a good starting point for our SEO strategy.

You can dig deeper to find more stats, but for this first run we should keep it basic and not take on too many things.

So look at who is ranking for that search term, try to see why they’re ranking so well.
What might it take to outrank them.

After we have the strategy we check whether or not we have any pages indexed for that, if we do we see about updating them with content and linking to them with those keywords from other pages on our site.

Since we do have pages, and our focus was to be strictly OnPage SEO then we’ll set that up as our first initial project.

SEO is Work

Schedule time to work on this project explicitly and don’t skip it.

Do all the steps as stated, track the results, and see if you get some measurable gains. After awhile, you’ll be able to know at a glance which project will produce the best results and you can get it done quickly due to practice.

On Page SEO – House Cleaning

When performing SEO on a dealer website, a good starting point is the on-page SEO, or on-site SEO.

Setting up for initial SEO – Whats First On The List

SEO work, like housework, can be a bit laborious.

Onsite SEO can be an effective way to get a good boost in traffic due to the lack of attention to detail when the site was initially launched.

Preparing your In House SEO for Visitors

Bottom line is to make the site and all of its pages relevant for the chosen keywords. Think of it as you’re putting things back where they belong, making sure there is food and drinks and so forth.

Why OnSite SEO is Tedious

Depending on what type of platform, whether its an open source CMS like WordPress or a custom coded site, the management of each individual page should include a few specific attributes that will tell search engines what your site or page is about.

One way to look at it would be cleaning house on WordPress would be like cleaning a hotel room, its done really quickly, yet all of the stuff you need is there. If it’s a house, then there could be many things you haven’t cleaned up around and thus you may take longer to get it looking perfect.

Process for Managing the Onsite SEO Effort – Just You or You Have Help

If it’s only you, don’t overextend yourself, just clean up whats reasonable. Don’t try to fix things you think may be broken but have no experience with, you’ll just lose productivity.

Before performing any real changes, get some good SEO tools and create some SEO Reports that will maintain changes over time in ranking, traffic, etc.

You will also want to select a few keywords. Just like you’re setting the table, pick keywords that match well and look good together. Keep track of what your guests like, enter them into a spreadsheet or SEO strategy checklist, depending on how much experience you have, you can always start small and scale up when you have the process down. Keep lots of details, like when I brought out the “wooden salad bowls” everyone loved them. Well, how did they love them? Did they ask where you got them, how interested in them were they? Maybe they liked them so much they’d buy them right then if they could, and if that is the case then you are properly monitoring the needs of your website visitors. Your site could be about cars and someone notices a cool graphic you made and wants one, be prepared to help them on all accounts.

Start gathering information on the internal links to other pages on the site, if they aren’t being clicked then why put them there. Maybe they aren’t ready to leave yet.

Keep the links organized, and avoid linking to sites that do not provide high quality content because it will lower your websites credibility and also its ability to rank well in Google. You wouldn’t send someone to the store in the hood by themselves, so why send them to sites that are just setup to scam people and manipulate them.

Onsite Pages Properly Structured For SEO

Theres a few ways to establish guidelines around what your pages should and should not include, but early on it is very important to simply make sure that all the links work and the page doesn’t take forever to load. Lets face it, until people know you, you have to let them take the full tour and guide them through every room(webpage).

Website Navigation with SEO Best Practices

Its probably too large a project if your main top or side navigation needs to be completely restructured so start by considering that visitors will navigate from within the body content. As you scan the content on your pages are you offering multiple opportunities to continue further into the site? Maybe you need a door here (link), or an image, or a way to tweet or like a piece of content. As soon as someone even so much as hints that they like any piece of content, get a like button next to it.

This is how you tie all your pages together with relevant anchor text so users are able to proceed to visit all the corners of your site. Think about what they’d want to read next, then take them there. Treat each page of your site as a critical piece of the overall objective and you’ll see great results.

SEO Is Broken Down Into Having A Process And Following It. Sometimes you need a quick resource to finding what you can do right now with your time and that is the intent of this post.

SEO Goals List

1. Increase Traffic by “insert number here”
2. Improve Rank for “insert keyword” by “number of positions up”
3. Fix Page Errors by “insert number”
4. Reduce page load time by “insert number of seconds”
5. Create better keyword strategy for “insert terms here” in order to rank “insert position”

The above would be a list from which you would select one goal and plan your work to achieve that goal.

Keep SEO Simple – Consistent – Accurate

Main things in SEO are Keywords, Pages and Links. Just don’t overdue it, I mean how many keywords can you jam into a single webpage? Optimize pages for targeted and high value keywords.

Don’t stuff your titles, you still want people to click through so create a compelling title tag, and begin the title tag with the term your targeting. You can also begin with your brand name if you are building out your name in a niche you wish to own.

Here’s a good SEO starter project.

Be sure to keep track of your rankings with a tool like Rank Checker available for free as a Firefox plugin as well as other SEO tools SEOBook.com.

KEYWORDS

Select 1-3 primary keywords to focus on for a single page

Don’t make a single page relevant for a lot of things (and a lot of keywords)
Don’t overdue it, be strategic with your work (develop tasks you can actually complete)
Don’t put low volume keywords on homepage (you’ll rank easy but gain nothing)

Our Clients Ranking Nationally For Highly Competitive Keywords

Start with a smaller volume, and a smaller set of SERP’s in order to get started and build from there.

If you are feeling brave, then by all means go after it but realize that you may not succeed. Here’s one example of a successful SEO plan, and it was accomplished by being very focused on a single goal.
These two images show a total monthly search volume opportunity of 275,000 queries.

What is your overall keyword strategy?

How will you measure your success – and your process is effective?
Track rankings and traffic for keywords targeted
Focus – There’s only a finite number of search terms you can pay close attention to, but
Don’t Forget about the Long Tail – these can add up to 80% of the results

What keywords are profitable enough?

Grab search volume – Is 5-10% of that traffic enough for my efforts?
based on the above example – 5% of 275,000 is 13,750 – what you might expect if you held the #1 slot
Identify low competition terms – 10% is reasonable
Monitor high competition – 5 % is reasonable
If the competition is really low, then 15% of google volume is achievable
Perhaps you’ll score a double indented listing
Identify the candidate keywords
Determine the profitability range – which convert?
Map the keywords to pages on your website – find any gaps in content.

PAGES

What pages will be specific to that keyword?
Are you lacking content then it will require even more work? You made need to develop pages of content.

TAKE ACTION

ONSITE – 1 week
How do I translate this research into the right actions?
Your Existing Keywords And Content
For every keyword – start with onsite optimization
Do you have a large or small amount of content pages
Using internal links to build on what’s already there before adding to it

OFFSITE – 3 weeks

Onsite SEO is the easy part – Most of the real work in SEO is linkbuilding
What is this all about? – Link building is about marketing and building relationships
Getting links that contain the right anchor text that get your pages ranked.

If you have 100 keywords on your list and you try to tackle this entire list, you’ll be spread too thin.
Start with a reasonable goal “2010 lexus rx350 models” may help eventually get you ranked for “lexus rx350 models”

SCHEDULE

Have A Realistic Schedule. This SEO checklist is to hit the major points, you want to make progress and hit goals so set aside a few hours a week.

Don’t create a list of 100 keywords – you will never have the time to optimize and create all the content for those terms.
Find the right landing page for no more than 3-4 keywords
Start with some easier, low volume keywords that aren’t going to be impossible to rank well for.

Weekly schedule – Devote 4-5 hours of Internal SEO Work on your site before doing anything else. This will make a huge difference.

Find the pages on your site to optimize, use Term Targeting to see how you are doing for the term you selected.
Then do the hard stuff – getting the links! Reach out to your local credit unions, newspapers, etc. If you have Google Alerts setup, everytime you get mentioned, see if the site (if credible) is willing to put a link on the page for you.

Set a Goal for Links, How many text links can you get in a week? Then send out an email, specifically to the person you want to reach and ask for it.

Use Open Site Explorer and check out your competitors, get backlink data on your competitors pages, see how they are ranked for your target keywords and where they obtained links from.
If your competitor has 20 backlinks with keyword anchor text than you need 30 or maybe 40. But also look at the quality of their backlinks using Open Site Explorer, are they from High Domain Authority sites? If not, it might only take 15 to beat them.

STICK TO THE STRATEGY

Don’t overcomplicate the task, just develop a process that fits your schedule. For one week concentrate on analyzing keywords, the next week analyze the pages you’re ranked for and grade them with the Term Targeting Tool, then finally once you’re optimized (you have good content and your page is high quality) seek out links.

Don’t just go out and publish stuff on other sites just to get a link, do your research on the sites using Open Site Explorer. If they don’t have high domain authority then it’s not work your time to obtain a link from them.

Also, diversify your work. Go after some really good high authority domains and see how you can get a link. Install the SEOmoz tool bar for Firefox so you can see which domains have authority. Below is a screenshot of the toolbar in action.

Keep track of your work and whether you are doing it yourself or you’ve hired an Automotive Internet Marketing service provider, make sure you are meeting or exceeding your goals.