Part one of the seo.com.mt SEO School.
Before you start with the actual work you need to decide what keywords you are going for. This is extremely important because sometimes it might be hard to change your mind in retrospect. For example if you get permanent links from Link-catalogues such as DMOZ it can be almost impossible to get them to change the link text. Chosing keywords is one of the tougher parts with SEO as there are many different factors that matters, the search demand on the specific keyword, the competition and the quality (for you) on the visitors from that keyword.
The search demand is fairly easy to find out if you have a little time and are prepared to spend a little money. Set up an Adwords campaign on Google and choose to only have your ads shown in the search results. Set it to all the interesting keywords and wait for a week or two. You can now see how many times your add hasa been shown on each keyword. This is not an exact figure of the search demand as your add might not always be shown but it is the absolutely best. Other methods can be checking Overture (they give you an estimate of the demand in their network) and Googles keyword selector tool (it is pretty rough but can at least give you ideas of where to start). Google Trends is useful for comparing keywords to each other as it shows the difference between the selected keywords.
The competition is a bit tricky, you have to try to evaluate how good your opponents have done their optimization, how much strength their sites have and if it might be possible for you (for a reasonable cost) to beat them. The quickest way is simply checking their PageRank, You can see it if you have the Google Toolbar installed. The problem with this method is that it is very inaccurate, Google doesn’t really use PageRank that way anymore and there are lots and lots of examples where pages with less PageRank are a lot harder to overtake than the pages with higher PR. The proper way of doing it is getting a look at their source code (if you use Firefox just right click on the page and View Source) and how their site looks in general, combine this with the inbound links you find and make your own estimate. This can be extremely time consuming, especially if you have a lot of interesting keywords. I’m going to give you a few shortcuts to speed up your competition research.
The first shortcut. If Wikipedia is visible on the front page the competition is generally weaker. Wikipedia have a page for a whole lot of search results and have a high level of general SEO. On high competition keywords Wikipedia have a harder time to compete though as the amount of inbound links to each article is usually not very high. This is not alway true, there are a few keywords where wikipedia is extremely strong.
The second Shortcut. Check in DMOZ for the top results. If they are listed in DMOZ the competition is harder. This is not always true but it can definately be a shortcut.
The third shortcut. Check the inbound links with the help of Yahoo siteexplorer. Simply type Linkdomain:thedomain.com -domain:thedomain.com. Yahoo will show you the amount of inbound links, a large amount is definately a sign of a strong site.
The quality of the visitors is a it harder to figure out because it is more of a human matter. There are lots of things you can do with your site to increase the conversion rate of your visitors but this guide is about getting the best visitors from the search engines and doesn’t have room for lengthy conversion rate discussions. In general we can say that a keyword that is very close to the product or service you sell will convert better. Blue hankerchiefs will convert better then hankerchiefs if it is blue hankerchiefs you sell. If you sell red though it will convert a lot less. Look out for the ”free” keywords, Free Poker for example will get you insane amounts of visitors but you won’t make much money from them, online poker is just slightly less when it comes to traffic and they will be ready to pay a lot more.