SEO or Search Engine Optimization

Over at Yahoo Answers someone asked this question

New online business – SEO?

Hi there, I am setting up a new online business and need some advice on how to do the SEO. I used to look after a website with my old job and the agency I used charged us £1000 p/month for adwords but being a small business I won’t have that kind of budget. Thanks

I talk to a lot of people every day that have similar questions about SEO and how to get a website ranked. So I thought I would post it here along with my answer.

The best way to get a website ranked in the search engines is to totally ignore them. When starting out with a website you are going to have a hard time ranking the site right out of the box. So it’s best to figure out other ways to market the site, things like YouTube videos, Facebook, Twitter, Press Releases, Squidoo, and so on. This allows us to get traffic immediately as well as start building backlinks for our site.

After you’ve figured out all the neat ways to drive traffic to a website and make sales then it’s time to start on the SEO.

I’ll usually pull up Google’s Wonder Wheel to get an idea of the pages I want to create. To pull up the Wonder Wheel, hit show options in the Google search results page. A menu will pop up and from that menu click Wonder Wheel.

Type our main keyword in the search box and we will get a list of all the categories Google feels are relevant to that keyword. From here we start building pages.

I am going to build a website theme shaped like a pyramid.

Our pyramid will have three levels. Top, middle, and bottom.

Top of Pyramid

● Tough competitive keyword phrase

Middle of Pyramid

● Medium competitive keyword phrases

● A category/related topic under the keyword phrase at the top of the pyramid

Bottom of Pyramid

● Long-tail, keyword phrases with low competition

● A category/related topic under the keyword phrases in the middle of the pyramid

● Extremely specific
This makes our website extremely themed, and allows for a streamlined experience from extremely vague (at the top), to extremely specific (at the bottom).

The idea is to focus the site on one idea and keep every page relevant to that same idea.

The first step is to create the low competition long-tail keyword phrases at the bottom of the link pyramid. Since these long-tail keyword phrases generally have little competition, we will quickly be able to boost these long-tails to the top of the search engines, allowing us to get near-immediate traffic with very little effort.

The secret is in the linking structure we will be implementing. This linking structure will pass the link juice around the website and then up to the higher levels of our pyramid.

Now…keep I mind that every keyword we select for the middle level of our link pyramid, will be based off the keyword at the top level of our pyramid.

For example, if the keyword phrase at the top of the pyramid is website design,

the keyword phrases in the middle of your link pyramid will be sub-niches of

Website design (e.g. Website Design Company, Website Software Development, Shopping Cart Website Design, and WordPress Website Design).

Every keyword phrase we select for the bottom level of our link pyramid will

be based off a keyword phrase in the middle level of our link pyramid.

Now…each webpage at the bottom level of our pyramid will be in a “keyword group” based on a keyword phrase that we found while expanding on the keyword phrases in the middle level of our pyramid.

We will link each webpage at the bottom level of our pyramid together in a non-specific order. These WebPages will also link to the corresponding webpage in the middle of the pyramid, and will also link to the webpage for that group at the top of the pyramid.

At the same time these pages are being built and set up we need to be getting links to the pages from outside sites using our keywords for that page as anchor text as well as other words.

And this is just enough to get you started, there is a lot more to it.