Firstly, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that has subscribed in the last few weeks. Welcome and I hope these posts are useful for you. If anyone getting these updates has any questions about SEO, please feel free to email me at any stage and I would be more than happy to help out.

Starting out in SEO

When you’re just starting out getting a website up and running, there are so many things to think of, particularly if you’re looking at the site from an SEO perspective. There’s literally thousands of blogs, websites, forums and feeds about SEO and online marketing – sometimes it’s hard to filter out all the noise to get to the bits that matter.

When I first started out doing SEO, I didn’t really know where to start. Since then I’ve read a lot of information and done a lot of testing on websites to gain my knowledge so I thought I would share with everyone how I got a start and learnt more about SEO.

SEO software

IBP
When I first started out looking into SEO I downloaded the free trial version of IBP (Internet Business Promoter). Even though I have no need for this software anymore, it was a great learning curve for me.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to change on your website. IBP will crawl through a page and make recommendations about what you have to do to rank for a particular keyword. It will look at all your competitors for that term and also tell you what they’re doing too! It’s a really great tool if you’re just starting out as it will tell you what elements you need to change (eg. title tags, description tags, h1, h2 tags, etc).

There are some really fancy tools on there and for the limitations of the free trial version it’s still worth downloading and having a play with.

You can download the free trial version of IBP here:-
http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm

SEO for Firefox

For those of you still using Internet Explorer I highly recommend you change to Firefox as it’s a much faster browser… and it’s not Microsoft! There are some great plugins you can get like SEO for Firefox. This plugin will allow you to see at a glance some very handy SEO information about a site such as:-

• Pagerank
• Google Cache Date
• Age of the site
• Yahoo inbound links
• Alexa ranking

And a whole host of other info.

The other great thing this tool does is add this information into a search results page so you can see at a glance info about sites in the serps.

You can get SEO for Firefox here 

Education

There are a million blogs out there about SEO, many of them good, many of them mediocre. I would recommend reading some of these blogs as a start then finding out what area of SEO you would like to focus on and find someone writing about the topic.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Matt is the head of Webspam at Google. He writes on his own personal blog about Google stuff, SEO and other topics. Some of the posts can be very technical but once you get an understanding of SEO sometimes they can be very helpful. The thing I find very useful with Matt’s posts is that if you read between the lines with his posts you can get some very insightful info. Sometimes it’s also helpful to read other people’s overviews of his posts to get a broad overview of what the industry thinks about a certain topic.

www.seomoz.org/blog
SEOmoz is probably one of the best SEO blogs on the net. Updated daily it’s chock full of information for newbies to advanced SEO’s. Well worth a look.

www.seobook.com/
Aaron Wall is one of the most talented SEO’s and markets himself very well. His insights into the SEO industry as a whole are great. His blog doesn’t go into too much detail about SEO strategy and the things you need to do to improve your website however, he does have a training program and a few free videos which are a good place to start.

http://blog.sitemost.com.au/
This is a great Aussie blog that gives loads of great insights into strategies you need to employ to have a holistic approach to SEO. They also have loads of tips, tricks and basics that you need to know to be able to SEOify your website.

http://www.webmasterradio.fm/
This has to be one of the best resources of SEO info on the net. Podcasts and live feeds from experts all around the world create a vault of information that is priceless in terms of learning about SEO. The only thing with listening to these shows is you need to go through a lot of guff to get to all the good bits….. but it’s well worth your time.

Testing

The best way to learn about SEO is to test things on your own website. If you can, set up a couple of websites and try different things. If you’re looking into SEO for a work-related site perhaps try downloading the trail version of IBP (or some other type of SEO software) to get you started.

The final word

Ultimately to be a great SEO you will need to have your finger on the pulse on a lot of different aspects of SEO and online marketing. It may sound scary that you have to read, test and SEO your site day in and day out, but ultimately SEO is something you will learn over time. The thing to remember is that SEO isn’t just about keywords and gaming the engines with cloaking, hidden text or black hat SEO techniques. It’s about building legitimate sites that add value to the net and it’s users. If you keep this in mind whilst building your websites, the rankings will follow.

A lot of people don’t know about the advanced operators for search engines and it’s a real pity because they can come in very handy not only for optimising your website, but for general searching as well.

I’ve mentioned a few advanced operators in this blog so far like the site: operator in this post
And the link: operator in this post

Today I’m going to tell you about the allintitle: operator.

What is that allintitle: operator?

Like most of the advanced operators in search engines it’s a command followed by a colon. After the colon you can put in a keyword or keyword phrase and Google will bring back all the results with that keyword or keyword phrase in the page titles of websites it has in its index.

OK… so how is that information useful?

Well, it can be a very handy way to determine if a keyword is worth chasing or not. When doing any type of SEO on your website it’s always a good idea to do some competitive research about how hard it will be to rank for a particular term. If there’s loads of competition for a particular keyword term, then chances are it’s going to be pretty hard to rank for that term. Let’s look at an example…

Let’s say I have an insurance website and I’m trying to figure out what keyword I should optimise my homepage for. I’ve done some keyword research and have come up with the following list:-

• cheap car insurance
• car insurance
• comprehensive insurance
• car insurance Brisbane

If we were to conduct an allintitle: on all these terms it’s interesting to see how many webpages out there have these keyword terms in their title (in Google).

• cheap car insurance 85,400 pages
• car insurance 922,000 pages
• comprehensive insurance 28,800 pages
• car insurance Brisbane 105 pages

That’s great, but what does all this mean?

What this means is that you are able to see how much competition there is for a particular term. The fewer sites that show up for an allintitle command, the less websites you’re competing against and the better chance you have of ranking for that term.

So looking at the examples above, I would be looking at the terms ‘comprehensive insurance’ and ‘cheap car insurance’ to go for as these have considerably less webpages with those terms in them. Not only that but the intent behind these searches is more targeted in that ‘car insurance’ is an incredibly broad term, meaning the traffic you will get from that term could be looking for all sorts of info about car insurance whereas the term ‘cheap car insurance’ has intent behind it. If I was driving people to my site using this term then obviously pricing is an issue for these searchers so I would be serving them up a page that has low cost as a major outline of a benefit statement.

This is just one of the many ways to see how hard it would be to rank for a particular term. Add it to your online marketing toolkit as you never know when it will come in handy.

Well, it’s finally here and ready for distribution… my 45-page e-book titled “Making Your Website Work”. It contains heaps of information I’ve learned from reading hundreds of SEO and online marketing blogs, websites, articles and forums.

For your free copy, all you have to do is subscribe to my blog via email (see the button over on the right). Previously I’d been sending my e-book out manually to everyone who subscribed to my blog via email, but I’ve been getting so many subscribers lately I just can’t keep up! So now it’s an automated process – when you click ‘subscribe’ you’ll receive a verification email with a link directly to a PDF of my e-book.

For everyone who has received a copy already, I would love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to put any feedback in the comments section of this post. If you know anyone you think will benefit from my e-book, please send them the link to my website so they can also subscribe and get their hands on a free copy.